PRINT Internship: Week 6

This week was all about transcriptions, but in different ways.

To finish the project that I was working on last week, I finished transcribing Phineas Pemberton’s will.  It was really interesting to not only transcribe a document that is over three hundred years old, but a legal document.  It was full of a lot of “I desire and bequeath unto” XYZ. It was six pages of long, drawn out explanations from a man who had a lot and knew he was dying soon.  To make more sense of the legal jargon and so people on my team or anyone else who may look at it in the future, I broke it down in to a table separating it in to his wife (Alice) and his four children Israel, Joseph, Abigail, and Priscilla with miscellaneous notes under, like when he appointed money to the Quakers to use towards the school.

I also uploaded all these documents in to the group zotero account and added tags to create easier search results.  This will be helpful when I start writing the biographies.

Our usual Tuesday meeting was postponed to Wednesday this week and the team discussed what we had all individually worked on throughout the week and what we wanted to work on going forward.  We discussed the next steps with the classes. One of the classes has a large assignment coming up where they will be writing blog posts based on the letters and the letters that the students chose do not have masters.  So a priority going forward will be to work on those.

After that, I gave feedback on the second transcriptions for the class I assist with.  This was another taste in to what it was like to be a professor and provide feedback, which I love.  Once this was finished, I met with Dr. Beiler on Friday afternoon to discuss the feedback and how the students did over all.  With her approval, I will be sending the feedback back to the students over the weekend and in to next week.

At this meeting we also discussed overall how I feel I am doing with the internship and what my focus will be going forward in to the coming weeks.  Transcriptions, workshops about transcriptions, giving feedback about transcriptions, etc. has been taking up most of my time so far but there is only one more assignment that I will be giving feedback for and then my focus will be solely on the Linked Open Data part of the internship and writing the biographies for these historical figures, starting first with the Pembertons and then expanding outwards.  Since there are so many historical figures associated with this project, the Pembertons are the priority.

Next week is an off week from transcription assistance for the class, so I will be working on Linked Open Data and biographies and trying to find additional documents through ancestry and other similar websites.

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