Week 2: Meeting the Team and Beginning Work

 

                Hello everyone, and welcome back to my blog. If you did not read the first entry of mine, my name is Hiram Davila. I am a student at the University of Central Florida and will be graduating this semester. This blog post will be following my internship with RICHES Digital Archive throughout the Spring 2023 semester.

 

                Last week I did not do anything in relation to my internship. This was the first week where I did some work and met some people who are a part of the team at RICHES. On Tuesday I had my first meeting. I met with Dr. Lester, who I had spoken to in the past, and Geoffrey Cravero, who is one of the digital archivists with RICHES who works a lot with the Metadata of the archive. The meeting was an introduction to a lot of different things, including what RICHES is about, the ongoing projects that RICHES is a part of some collaboration efforts with other groups, and upcoming events. During this meeting I was also invited be a part of the weekly meetings that all RICHES team members participate in, and I am looking forward to next week where I can meet everyone else involved with RICHES as well as getting a better understanding of what is projects other members are working on.

                Additionally, I was also given an overview of what I will be working on. The first thing was working on a transcript for an interview that was conducted by RICHES. I have only written a transcription once before and it was for an interview that I conducted with a family friend. Its safe to say that I have very little experience with working on transcripts. After I finish with the transcripts, I was given a plethora of options of what I can do next. I love that I was given many options and was not pigeon-holed to doing a certain thing, and all the options help RICHES with its current projects.

 

                All the work I have done this week is in regard to the transcript. As stated before, I have very little experience in writing transcripts, but I was given a lot of support for Mr. Cravero. He supplied me with other RICHES transcripts, a guide to how to write them, and has been a fantastic source of feedback when I have questions. After transcribing a little of the interview and getting feedback, I have found that I have a problem of writing down words that are not there. Reading over what I have transcribed and listening to the interview, I sometimes finish a sentence earlier when the interviewee may be stumbling over his words. In a transcript, whatever they say I need to write down, so the words he is stumbling over I need to make sure to write them down. I also tend to overlook when people say “uh” or “um”. While I write most of them down, its one of those things that my mind just skips over when I am listening to the interview sometimes, but something I need to write down.

 

                Overall, I enjoyed this week. I am looking forward to finishing this first transcript, getting it revised, and moving on to my next assignment. I am grateful that everyone I have met this week has been very supportive and helped me the best they could. I am excited for what’s to come.