PRINT Internship Week 3
This week was all about transcriptions and assisting students.
I started my week by making some edits to the transcription manual used by both students and members of the PRINT team while we are working through these historic letters. We have strict guidelines so that regardless of who is working on a specific letter, no personal tone or style really has space to come through to ensure they are all uniform. The edits that I made were based on the workshops we did last week and repeated corrections that we were finding in the assignments.
Part of my internship is assisting students in learning with their transcriptions. Considering that I’ve been working with the PRINT project for about six months now, I am kind of a veteran with transcriptions and the whole process. Many of these new students that are in these classes may be experienced in reading primary sources that have already been transcribed or perhaps even some primary sources that are handwritten like diaries or logs, but I don’t think I would be at all incorrect to say that many of them don’t have experience with 300+ year old Quaker letters and all their obscure “Quaker speak.”
The beginning of my week was spent giving feedback on the first round of transcriptions from one of Dr. Beiler’s classes and met with Dr. Beiler and the other research assistant to go over what we said and why we gave the feedback that we gave. We don’t provide grades to the students, but we do help with corrections and providing feedback to help them excel the next round.
After this, we met for our weekly PRINT meeting where I presented my biographical template that I came up with last week as well as the edits that I made to the transcription manual to receive peer feedback on if they were sufficient and if not, what improvements needed to be made on them. The feedback was very helpful and I began correcting them immediately.
After this, on Thursday I participated in another student workshop to assist with the transcriptions. Students from both classes showed up and since both classes are working on different letters, Dr. Beiler and I split the group and I guided a few of the students on my own. I actually really enjoyed this because I would love to one day be in academics and this was a great insight to instructing in a historical atmosphere. I changed it up a little bit and made sure to reference the manual and really stress how important it was to read the whole thing, especially the first part (which I think I’m more invested in now because that was the part that I worked on this week). This coming week I will be giving feedback on the next round of transcriptions and then I’ll have a break from them for a little while and will be working on my Linked Open Data that I am really excited to work on. I had such a fun time researching Abigail last semester, I know I’ll enjoy learning about everyone else.
