Print Internship Week 13
This week I got to share my love of Abigail with the world. And by the world I mean the two students who showed up for my presentation and Dr. French.
This week was the UCF Celebrates the Arts presentation that we have been preparing for the last couple weeks. On Tuesday we touched base one more time to make sure that we were all on the same page and ask any last questions that we may have had. Then we did our usual updates on where we were on our individual tasks for the projects and what we are doing going forward. I realized that I was getting very hung up on finding primary sources and it was impeding my ability to work on them the way that I wanted to. So I presented the plan to the team that the biographies would become more of a living document rather than a perfect biography with all primary sources cited from the meeting minutes. Although the minutes are a wealth of resources and have everything that we need for the biographies somewhere in them, the databases that we have that we find on ancestry don’t exactly have a table of context and good index to be able to find exactly what’s needed. Dr. Beiler agreed with the plan of action and I’ll continue to research and transcribe documents to fill in the holes or confirm with primary sources.
On Wednesday, we did the UCF Celebrates the Arts. I had a great group. From the experience that I have had working with students and these letters, it takes a while to go through the letters, so I was only planning on doing a portion of the letter in the 45 minutes or so in our breakout rooms. That was not the case with the wonderful people I had the pleasure of working with. They blew through the letter so fast that we ended up pulling up a subsequent letter and transcribing that one as well. Because they were doing so well we were able to stop in between sections so that I could explain the context of what Abigail was writing in more detail. It was actually a really nice experience that I really enjoyed.
On Friday, I met with Dr. Beiler and we discussed the progress about the biographies and the internship in general. We then talked about the best way to record the dates with the differences in the Julian and Gregorian calendars because, for example, Phineas Pemberton was born in January of 1649 and died in March of 1701 according to the Quaker records but by new standards it is 1650 and 1702. I’ll be using the new standards and making a note. We then talked about grad school and the options that I have as I continue to move forward.
Next week is spring break but with the state of the world, I’ll probably just continue with research as normal.
