Final Print Internship Post

Well this has been a crazy semester and I can’t believe it is basically over. I learned so much about being a historian but also about myself in general.

I learned that I love instructing and talking about history.  Some of the highlights were the UCF Celebrates the Arts presentation and the one on one consultations with some of Dr. Beiler’s students.  Of course, working with some of these historical sources was amazing and I really enjoy being able to learn so much about these individual’s lives hundreds of years after they lived.

Being able to be involved in digital humanities and contribute to the Linked Open Data, something that is so important, was humbling.  I had absolutely no idea what I was doing at first and was, honestly, really intimidated by it.  But the more I have worked with it, the more comfortable I am becoming and I plan to continue to work on it on a volunteer-base going forward.

I already sort of was aware about some flaws I have, but this internship brought to light areas of myself as an academic and historian where I can improve.  I really enjoy this subject and there is so little that we really know.  So I get lost in the Quaker meeting minutes and the letters and the other random primary sources I come across and sometimes lose track of the task at hand.  The tasks still are completed when they need to be and I accomplish tasks, but I need to work on getting lost in black holes of information.  It is beneficial to this project and Dr. Beiler didn’t regard this as something that worked against us, but I still feel that I can improve.  I’m also a bit of a perfectionist and I have learned that while studying history, there might not always be a complete package.

This week I met with the PRINT team like we always do and we discussed what projects we were working on and briefly discussed how we felt the UCF Celebrates the Arts event went.

I worked on biographies and the Linked Open Data for Phineas and Phoebe Pemberton, the patriarch and matriarch of our project, and am now moving on to work on the rest of the children. Israel will be relatively easy since there is a lot of information out there about him.  However Priscilla and Joseph might be difficult.  Priscilla is a woman and doesn’t have a lot of biographical information and Joseph died as a teenager.

On Thursday, I met with Dr. Beiler and we discussed my final evaluation.  She said that I worked well on the project and shared my above areas of improvement and we brainstormed ways to improve this.

I am very grateful for this opportunity.