Week 5: Research QA and Support

This week I started my research for PRINT quality assurance plan. I designed a Microsoft Form for the PRINT team to fill out during our weekly meeting. Quality assurance comes with trial and error and this week I faced my first error. The image below is what the form looked like:

The researchers had issues completing the form due to the briefness of the except. They asked that I use a more detailed excerpt instead. So, this week with the help of Casey, I created a new form for them to complete for next weeks meeting. Here is what the new form looks like:

As you can see there is more mentions to pull from this letter. It will be interesting to see what the researchers will notice, as they are only allowed to document one mention. I will be saving each answers from the forms and reviewing them with the researchers the following week. I also will be developing metrics as I progress in my internship. These Microsoft Forms will be important in finding agreements and disagreements among researchers. Since we have a diverse group who annotate differently, it will be important in creating a comprehensive protocols for everyone to follow.

On my off hours, I have been working on a proposal for Digitorium at the University of Alabama. This proposal was based off the research I am conducting this summer. Next week I will be out of town to visit schools, but when I return I hope to continue quality assurance with a review of the prior assessment. I also plan to talk to researchers from tech and database teams.

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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 an in

Week 2: Transcription Practice & Protocols

In my second week of my internship at PRINT I started to become familiarized with my role. Each week I participate in Tuesday team meetings and transcription Friday. After Tuesday's meeting I had a one-on-one with Dr. Beiler and we discussed the syllabus and the type of the work I will be engaging in throughout the summer. Dr. Belier and Dr. Miller asked if I would like to work on quality assurance in the databases which I happily agreed. For this task I will need to read secondary literature on a concept called i nter annotator agreement. Essentially I will be examining the metadata throughout PRINT's database beginning with the Pemberton papers and make sure annotators are being consistent. In order to do so I will need to familiarize myself with PRINT protocols for metadata as well as EndNote which I began this week. EndNote is PRINT's database for their papers. In addition to my work on metadata, I am practicing how to transcribe letters in STARS database. This week I t

Week 3: More Transcriptions and Inter Annotator Agreement

This week I doubled my workload of transcriptions and find myself getting better at the puzzle. When I transcribe a letter the most important part is to follow the transcription guide created by PRINT. This guide is key to understanding how to transcribe a letter. After I finish my current round of transcription I will be nearing my benchmark of 10 letters transcribe (as noted in my syllabus). From there I will begin transcribing in Zooniverse which is a platform that collaborates between PRINT employees and volunteers. I also continued to learn another set of protocols this week with the HSP EndNote. This database holds the Pemberton papers which is the first set of documents worked on in the PRINT project. During the first weeks of my internship I will be working on transferring data from EndNote to an excel sheet that reflects PRINT's updated protocols. Essentially I am dissecting letters in the Pemberton papers for information pertinent to the project. This process relies off s

P.R.I.N.T Summer Internship

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