Week 4: More Pemberton Papers and IAA Lingo

This week I was out-of-town for vacation but worked remotely for PRINT. I started my week off with a meeting with Brook, Dr. Beiler, and Casey. The first half of the meeting was dedicated to updates on the HSP database which I will be working with Casey on updating to new PRINT protocols. This process will take a while as there are over 500 entries in EndNote that need to be updated. EndNote is the database in which PRINT's repositories are located. I will be primarily working with the Pemberton papers and will need to familiarize myself with Phineas Pemberton's handwriting. Below is an example of his penmanship:

Since Casey and I will be working on this project together I will be able to learn from her experience while annotating letters to the best of my ability.

The second half of the meeting was dedicated to a Q&A with Brook on two readings on Inter Annotator Agreement. Brook and I went over the main ideas of the articles and what we thought was important to implement in PRINT's quality assurance. I also asked Brook questions about ideas from the articles that I was unsure of like heterogeneous and homogenous data. Data that is heterogeneous are entries that are prone to subjectively and may be different each time it is annotated like location. Homogenous data are entries that do not change such as names or dates. We also discussed ways we could implement IAA into PRINT since this will be one of my main projects for the summer. One of the important ideas we agreed on was conducting workshops during weekly team meetings centered on quality assurance. It will consist of a Microsoft form with an attached letter which will ask selected persons from repositories to identify mentions they believe are in the document. After they are completed we will ask each person to walk us through their thought process to find out if there are agreements or disagreements with the mentions. From this we will learn if the protocols are working or if more clear information should be added. This trial will take some time and may not be perfect by the end of the semester, but the work this summer will be beneficial in creating a quality assurance process for PRINT.

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Week 11: Internship Showcase

There are only two weeks left for my internship and this week I got to share my experiences with my peers in the Internship Showcase. Instead of individual presentations I got to present with my fellow PRINT team members, Bree and Maggie. We worked together leading up to the presentation to create our presentation and outline. Bree's focus this summer was working on letters within a repository while Maggie worked on network mapping. I shared my work with quality assurance using Inter Annotator Agreement. We each had different roles but our presentation came together great. Each role showcased the different ways researchers are utilized for the PRINT project. It also did a great job showcasing the project for students who had no idea what PRINT was as well as potential students who were interested in joining the project. Here is the link to the rest of our presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/10VVF192NSuTNGhey2Lod1FUozXuZrS5Ef1kxClTy-HI/edit?usp=sha...

Week 7: Difficult Transcriptions

This week I was faced with the most difficult letter yet. The letter I transcribed was sent from James Harrison to Roger Longworth via Susannah Milner. It caught me by surprise due to how close the lines were and type of handwriting. Here is what the letter looked like: As you can infer, it took me a while to get through the letter. I sent in my transcript to Adaeze, who is in charge of transcriptions, and fill it out to the best of my ability. I am hoping that her feedback will clarify some sentences/words that I had difficulty on and so I can improve on the next letter I transcribe from James Harrison. This week I also did another research quality assurance assignment for the team on mentions. The researchers had a better time identifying mentions and almost all of them were in agreement for their annotations. Here is a look at what this week's assessment letter looked like: Next week I will be beginning group mentions assessments as it was suggested by researchers a couple week...

Week 1: Introduction

Hello! My name is Marissa Bellenger and I am a graduate student in the history department. This summer marks my second year in the program. My research interests are the Civil Rights Movement, Jim Crow, and the New Jim Crow. This summer I will be capstoning and defending my thesis proposal which is the NAACP Equalization campaign in Florida with a focus on the Florida State Teachers Association and professional member networks. This past year I have been a graduate research and teaching assistant for the history department. I also just finished an internship with the City of Orlando in the records department where I built my metadata, microfilm, and cataloging skills. In addition to working on the P.R.I.N.T project this summer I will be a research assistant for the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Seminole newspaper project. I hope my internship with P.R.I.N.T. will improve my transcription skills as many sources in my own research are cursive handwriting that can be difficult to read. I also have a...

P.R.I.N.T Summer Internship

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