Print Internship Week 4

This week really emphasized for me the importance of takin advantage of any help that is offered in a class.  Last week, I talked about how I helped conduct a workshop for Dr. Beiler’s students, assisting them in transcription of handwritten letters over 300 years old in a script that is sometimes confusing to read (why did you need to write your “e”s backwards, Quakers?)

At the workshop that I helped run, we split in to two groups to assist with the two different letters assigned to the classes.  The letter that I assisted with was the one that I later provided feedback for.  While the workshop was open to everyone and a survey was sent out with different times so it could ensure that the most amount of people would be able to attend, only two people showed up, with one leaving half way through.  Not surprisingly, the one person who stayed until the end of the workshop did the best when I was providing feedback.

Feedback for these assignments is done by opening up the submitted word document and making in line corrections with “track changes” turned on so it is quite clear what has been changed.  I think that this is an effective tool because it is essentially the red pen of the digital world, showing corrections and offering guidance directly in line with what was submitted.

Once these corrections were made, I met with Dr. Beiler and explained how the students did based on a rubric and, with her guidance, sent an email to every student offering some further explanation, pointing them to the transcription manual again, and offering further guidance if needed through email communication.  Once again, I really enjoyed this whole process because I do have a goal to be in academics in the future and this is a great example of the whole process from start to finish when it comes to assignments, although I do not provide the grades to the students.

I had eight students that I had to do feedback for this week so that took up most of my time.  Other than that, I did finish my updates to the transcription manual and uploaded the PDF document in to the PRINT shared drive which was then shared with all the students by Dr. Beiler.  I also met with the PRINT team to discuss our weekly progress as we do every week. This is always an important time of the week and helps us all see what everyone is working on and if there is any guidance or ways we can help each other achieve our goals.

For now, transcriptions are finished for the class and I will go back to working on my research to fill the Linked Open Data, which is the part of the internship that I am really excited about.  I am really interested in seeing where this all takes me.  Pouring through these historical documents looking for little mentions and blurbs about a list of people is going to be a challenge but I am enthusiastic to see what will come up.