RICHES Internship Blog Post #3

           This week we had our weekly RICHES meeting with all of the other staff members on Monday. We primarily discussed everything that had been completed in between the last meeting and the meeting we had Monday. We also discussed what we would be hoping to get accomplished for the week. This week I also picked my second piece of metadata. I had a little bit of a hard time deciding what to do for my second piece of metadata. I ended up settling on a sort of condolence letter written to the former manager of Weeki Wachee Springs, who had decided to resign. Most of the metadata we are creating is on photos, which makes it a little bit more difficult and often takes a lot more time to create the metadata than it took me during my previous internship. However, this is giving me a great skillset and the ability to work with many more different kinds of sources that need metadata. Personally, I love working with letters and photos for traditional history research because in a way letters and photos are a snap shot of the soul. We may not always know exactly what that person is feeling who is writing the letter, but we as the reader can get an idea through their word choice and tone in the letter. Photographs are literally a snapshot in time and can capture the essence of time or place. It is quite interesting to write about traditional history using sources like these. It is quite challenging then to write metadata with little to no information to go on but a great learning experience. Geoff also has given us the email of an individual who wrote her thesis on Weeki Wachee and has said she would be willing to assist us with finding out the information we cannot find out in doing our own research for the metadata. This will be very helpful in creating and expanding the spreadsheet. This is a whole new perspective of looking at metadata for me than I had done previously. It is very exciting to have to opportunity to explore Florida history more in-depth through this internship.
            This weekend and next week I will be emailing Mike who is working on the Bending Towards Justice team to see how setting up a second email for me is going. There were a few issues with that for me, as he was unable to add me to the team’s account because I only have a student email and not a staff, faculty, or GA email address. I will be trying to get in contact with him again to find out if he was able to create an additional email for me so I can work on the Bending Towards Justice part of the internship. For this portion of the internship, I will be working with Dr. Gordon on the legal history aspects of voting rights for African Americans and voter suppression. This again makes me very excited because legal history is so tightly linked to my personal thesis. As a result, this project will give me a wealth of knowledge into my own thesis in many respects. This weekend and coming week, I will also be working on finishing up my second piece of metadata. I am finding it does take me a bit longer for this different style of metadata then I had done previously. I do really enjoy how in-depth it is though.

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