PRINT Internship Week 7
This week was about becoming a subject matter expert.
At the beginning of the week I finished my feedback on the second transcription and sent them back to all the students. This was team feedback based on my meeting with Dr. Beiler last week. While I do not assign grades, I do provide useful feedback to the students including sending them back an edited document that shows all the corrections when tracking changes are turned on.
On Tuesday, the PRINT team met for our weekly update. I always enjoy this time of the week because it is nice to talk about a project with like-minded individuals. Not everyone is as much of a history buff as I am in my social circle and family. I didn’t have as much to update on since the previous meeting last Wednesday but since a few people weren’t at the previous meeting, I updated them with the work that I did with Phineas’ will. At the end, Dr. Beiler told us about an awesome opportunity that has been presented to this project: to participate in the art week at the end of the semester and do a presentation or seminar on our work with transcriptions and digital history databases. Dr. Beiler said that the organizer became extra interested when they heard about Abigail and all the work we’ve been doing with her. And, I have to say, I was so excited and honored that I was a part of that. After the research that I did about her last semester and the connections that I made about her life, I feel like I can talk about her for hours. Which, in itself is a really great feeling as a budding historian: finding a subject that I’m passionate about, doing a ton of research, and discovering different aspects about the subject or, in this case, person.
On Tuesday afternoon I met with a student for a one on one consultation about their next big assignment in Dr. Beiler’s class which is a blog post about a topic having to do with the letters they are transcribing. This student chose mercantilism and it was really interesting to be a sort of small subject matter expert. I was able to point him in the direction of a few articles and letters that would be helpful and made a couple suggestions about an interesting direction he could take his post.
On Wednesday, I met with another student whose topic was women’s roles which is something that I am even more comfortable with and I was able to do the same. I also was able to give them some background on the Pemberton family and Quakers in general during this time.
After this consultation, I met with Dr. Beiler to recap what I spoke to the students about so she was aware and we talked about how her class was doing overall, what she spoke to them about, and what I could expect when I start reading their first drafts of their blog posts due soon. We also spoke about me doing an additional blog post or reflection on my whole experience with this internship to add to the website.
Next week I plan on doing some more linked open data research and working on some biographies for the website.
