I finished my fifth week with APS, and I’m about halfway finished my hours and time there. I currently have worked 67 of my 139 hours. This upcoming week I plan to work about 18-20 hours. My time with APS continues to be enlightening and fascinating. Every day I’ve been learning something new, honing skills, and enjoying every aspect of the position as the Levitt Fellow. I’m thankful for the opportunity!
On Monday I continued my work surveying the Shreve and family papers collection. Joe and Sabrina talked to me about the process they’ve been pioneering and testing to survey, process, and digitize a collection all at once. Both are excellent mentors who helped me understand how the process is still being refined in some ways and asked me to give any feedback from my experience with it. They gave me some papers to read about how they are doing it, and then I started following that with the Shreve and family papers collection. At the end of the day, I worked on transcribing to prepare to go over my work with Bethany on Thursday.
On Thursday I reviewed the notes Bethany added to my transcriptions, and we meet to discuss them. After going through it, Bethany had me read a few pages out loud to her and she would help me when I got stuck on a word. Being able to hear real-time feedback was great, and she would remind me to reflect on the person’s writing patterns and how that could help when being stuck on a word with deciphering letters. I did more transcription later as well. I joined a 3 pm career chat with Adrianna Link. She told us about her experience in the field, her life, and her educational background, and opened up to us about a lot of very honest experiences that I was grateful to hear about. On Friday I met with Sabrina in the morning to rehouse parts of the Shreve Collection. At this point, I had it fully inventoried and a baseline description of it. We rehoused documents into new folders and organized the papers chronologically. We kept the original inventory to maintain the organization that was previously established in an Excel spreadsheet and created a new tab for the up-to-date inventory listing that we just made. I started working on the advanced metadata for the collection. Once all of that is done, I believe we move on to digitizing it. I wrote some condition notes, and two of the objects have to go to conservation to have ribbons removed before we can digitize them. Sabrina told me I’d be giving a brown bag presentation about my work in about two weeks, so when I come in on Monday I’m going to start working on this presentation. I believe the presentation will be on Tuesday, August 1st, and I will most likely be presenting digitally because that’s my mandatory office day at Penn. I was also asked if I would be interested in writing a blog post in my last week about the project and my overall experience with APS for them, and I’m thrilled at the opportunity to do so!
Another fun and productive week with APS! My hope is to try to maintain around 18-21 hours over the next 3 weeks so that I can finish in 4 weeks. This way I can give myself a bit of a break between the end of my internship and the start of the school semester.
I’ve been finding some time during the summer to work on some personal projects that I’m very proud of. I wrote a paper for my seminar class entitled, “Flower Petals and Sticky Notes: South Korean Feminism”, which I want to continue to develop. My advisor, Dr. Motyl and my instructor Dr. Berman gave me excellent feedback and advice on ways to develop this further. I’ve done some reading summer reading, but haven’t written anything else to add to this. I translated some more sticky notes for another section I’d like to add, and started forming a more robust historiography mentally, but again haven’t put pen to paper (or fingers to keys) on it. Even though this hasn’t necessarily progressed, I wanted to share the small updates! I also worked with my Father In-Law to help translate a plaque for Gwangmojae, the Ancestral Shrine to Yi Won (1368-1429), the 11th generation of my partners family. I was honored to be asked to help with this, and it let me combine my affinity for public history and my growing interest in Korean translation work.