Another semester, and another opportunity to document my academic journey! While my previous internships have leveraged digital tools primarily to conduct and present research, this semester’s internship will, in many ways, focus more heavily on the “digital” of digital history and the humanities as I contribute to the PRINT digital project. The PRINT (People, Religion, Information Networks, and Travel) Portal consists of a digital repository housing records from institutions around the world with visualization and transcription components. These records include correspondence and other documents sent amongst religious dissenting groups in the seventeenth and into the eighteenth centuries. While this project has been in the works for many years now, an NHPRC grant allows for more concentrated and dedicated efforts to finally push the project to the “published portal” envisioned from the start.
Internships have always been a crucial part of my academic and professional journeys, as they always present exciting opportunities to dive in and “do” history with public audiences in mind. This semester’s internship is particularly sentimental as I started on the project in 2016 as an undergraduate and now, I am in capstone for a Master’s. My work on the project began with data input, cleanup, and standardization; I also worked at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania for a summer to scan and create metadata for a section of Pemberton Papers—a compelling collection which explores the stories and lives of Pennsylvania Quaker correspondents as they traversed across and navigated the British Atlantic world. PRINT’s commitment to engaging public audiences through digital tools and interactions, as well other classes at UCF, have shaped my professional path; I look forward to continue developing skills which merge analog history with digital tools and methodologies, all with the goal to contribute to projects which highlight technology’s potential to connect public audiences to the historical record.
This semester, my established goals for the project are threefold: 1) outline database protocols for standardization, 2) prepare images for upload to the transcription platform Zooniverse, and 3) create “master” versions of transcribed records by rectifying crowdsourced transcriptions. These goals are crucial to the project’s growth and expansion. With the NHPRC grant providing funding for the largest team of student contributors to date, more collections from a variety of repositories around the world will be added to the record pool. This includes organizing and processing images for upload while creating metadata records to describe the documents. As such, documentation concerning metadata protocols is now necessary to ensure all contributions support end goals with minimal interventions by more experienced project team members to maximize the efficiency of all work. These images will also be processed differently for upload to the transcription platform Zooniverse and made available for volunteer citizen transcribers. A section of the Pemberton Papers has already been uploaded to and completed within Zooniverse. Importing these transcriptions into the PRINT project requires a consensus be made among any variations—a process which is conducted in the platform’s backend ALICE. Together, these three goals constitute major steps along PRINT’s journey to decentralize and open access to historical participation and inquiry for public audiences.
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