PRINT Internship Week 2
This week was full of enriching activities.
At the beginning of the week, on Tuesday, the entire team met for our weekly update. At this meeting we talk about what we’ve accomplished the week prior and what we intend to do in the coming weeks. My assignments for the week were to finish my work on two transcriptions that I was deciphering last semester for my assignment on Abigail Pemberton, attend a workshop for the students in Dr. Beiler’s classes to discuss the transcription assignment they had to turn in this week, and create a template for the brief biographies we will be putting together.
The last two transcriptions were from Phineas Pemberton to his daughter, Abigail. While they were in colonial Pennsylvania where it would seem that women didn’t have much agency, Abigail helped her father immensely in running his business. These two letters from the late 1690s were mostly business matters, but were also clearly from a father to his daughter. It chastised her for not dating her letters but also praised her on her intelligence and drive. It was actually quite touching to read some of it.
On Tuesday evening, I helped run a workshop for one of Dr. Beiler’s classes. Transcriptions in 17th century Quaker speak can be difficult. Common wording includes backwards “e”s that often look like “o”s, and words like “ye,” “wth,” and “wch” with some of the letters sometimes being in a subscript and, of course, are shorthand for “the,” “with,” and “which” repsectively. People have a hard time with it, naturally.
I created the template for the biographies that we will be writing. While these biographies are going to be a project that I will be primarily working on throughout the semester, Dr. Beiler and I felt that it was important for me also to create a general template so that if others gathered enough information on someone, they could write it, but it wouldn’t be blatantly obvious it was written by someone else. I based the template of these biographies off the biographical dictionaries we often reference while researching. While these entries are often pages long, at the beginning it gives brief information like their birth and death location and date and their spouse and children. I added their parents information and quick pertinent information like a brief description of their occupation, immigration, connections, or other brief facts.
I intended on conducting some research to populate the Linked Open Data (LOD) and create some more biographies, but Thursday afternoon Dr. Beiler sent me and the GRA an email asking us to give feedback on a transcription assignment according to the rubric that had been turned in early and meet with her Friday afternoon to go over it. While we don’t assign grades to them, we do go line by line assessing for errors and making corrections in the form of documents. This was a great inside look at some of the tasks a professor would perform and I really enjoyed.
This coming week I will be giving feedback on the remaining transcriptions for the class, attending a transcription workshop for Dr. Beiler’s other class, and, if I have time, will be researching to populate the LOD and write my brief biographies.
