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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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