Week 4: Collaborations

As we approach the end of the first month of the semester, things have started to pick up. Though it is not directly related to my work here with the Veterans History Project, I would be remiss not to share that I have been granted the amazing opportunity to work with the remarkable UCF PRINT team for my Computer Science Senior Design course! People, Religion, Information Networks, and Travel – Migration in the Early Modern World, as the acronym stands for, is a digital humanities project operating within the UCF History Department that works to trace communication networks and analyze how they have shaped migration in the Atlantic World. My team has been tasked with, broadly, enhancing the existing visualization tools to help create a smooth and comprehensive user experience within the PRINT Portal. Users will have access to a database with digital copies of manuscripts, as well as the connections they form through the recipients and their travels. As the PRINT website states (link below for anyone curious to peruse), "This groundbreaking portal transforms traditional archival cataloging practices through the creation of digital tools to foster new textual and network analysis." Having the opportunity to work on a project that has my interests so intertwined at their core has me extremely grateful. 

My work at the Veterans History Project is merely beginning, and I am excited to see how it takes off in the coming weeks. In my previous post I mentioned the journalistic intentions and standards this project upholds -- this week I have been able to engage with these expectations more closely. After a brief virtual meeting (or rather a recorded session, due to my own scheduling conflicts), I had the opportunity to be introduced to several of the other interns and the work that my team lead has done to compile information regarding our tasks, as interns, here with the VHP. To begin my work, my colleagues and I will be working to process and transcribe "bundles" of interviews collected by the VHP. I am, admittedly, a little nervous to begin doing so, as there is just such an enormous amount of information that we have access to here and certainly plenty of work to be done. I am confident that with the collaborative efforts of my team lead, fellow interns, and my project managers this will be smooth sailing, and I look forward to diving into the project further with more nitty gritty details to report in the upcoming week. 


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