jamessilveirablog

[jamessilveirablog]

Week 5 Blog: The Beginningnote

Hi blog! This week consisted of me working on my ability to tackle Endnote mostly by myself and it has been productive. I had questions for most of the documents, but I managed to work on some of them without asking too many. I worked on documents 1438-1442 this week, and a challenge I faced was how broad the receivers of the letters were. For example, in document 1440, the receiver is written as “to the ministers of the Baptisim-minded congregations, worthy friends in Holland, namely in Amsterdam.” They referred to a group of people instead of a specific person. It was tricky at first, but then I realized that these are the Amsterdam congregations, which I then translated to Gemeenten te Amsterdam.

That was my biggest challenge by myself this week, but my biggest challenge with help this week was the keywords. I picked out keywords for these documents by myself and then Kailey went over them to remove/add keywords. I definitely need to work on choosing the right keywords, but I think I am doing decent so far. I made a list of questions I need to ask Kailey next week, so I am excited to keep improving on Endnote.

As I stated in my previous blog, I would be tackling my first Peter Hendricks letter, 15935, again this week, and it went a lot better this time. I did not end up finishing it, but Kayla allowed me to work on it next week too. I understand the English-Dutch handwriting of Peter Hendricks a lot better, and I am confident that I will be able to finish it next week. I am planning on scheduling a meeting with Brendan after I finish it so that we can go over the words I was not able to figure out.

This week on Transcription Thursday, a one-hour Zoom meeting where we all take turns transcribing lines of a letter together, we worked on a letter from a Dutch woman who wrote in English, just like Peter Hendricks. I do not know her name, but the writing is a lot neater than Hendricks’. I did catch a similarity between how she and Hendricks write their ST and how they connect the two letters together, but that is the only prevalent similarity I caught. She misspells some words, but Peter Hendricks misspells many words, and with the mixture of Dutch and English handwriting, it can be tricky to transcribe, so I am proud of the progress I have made so far. Thanks for reading!

[jamessilveirablog]

Week 4 Blog: The Redemption of Peter Hendricks

Hi, and welcome back! I feel so proud of myself this week. Last week, I did not do so well on my first Peter Hendricks letter, letter 15935, so I was pretty nervous about transcribing my second Peter Hendricks letter, letter 15962, this week. Although this week’s letter took me 4 hours to complete, I was able to transcribe it in its entirety. At Tuesday’s meeting, Dr. Beiler asked me if it was because I had practice with the first Hendricks letter or if it was simply easier, and I think it was a mix of both. 15962 was a lot easier for me to read over 15935, but I also think I would have struggled with it if I had not practiced with the first letter. Hopefully, by the next couple of letters, I will be able to transcribe in less than 2 hours. I went over 15962 with Brendan on Wednesday and it was a highlight of my week. It felt good to understand Dutch handwriting a little more this time around. Peter Hendricks redeemed himself for me, and now we like him.

Besides my productive work on transcription this week, Endnote also went well. Before I dive into my week with Endnote, keep in mind that PRINT weeks start on Friday and end on Thursday instead of the usual Monday through Friday. Anyway, up until this week, it was mainly Kailey working on Endnote while I observed her. On Friday, we switched places and I was the one working on Endnote while she observed and helped me. On Tuesday before the PRINT meeting, I worked on an Endnote document all by myself and asked Kailey questions about it afterward. After the PRINT meeting, Kailey, Adaeze, and I worked on Endnote together and it was another highlight of my week.

I understand the basic Endnote protocols by now, but I know there is still so much I have yet to learn. More often than not, each document I work on has a new protocol that I had not known about, which can seem overwhelming, but I am encouraged to ask questions about what I am unsure of, so it does not feel too intimidating. My goal is to work on Endnote all by myself without needing to ask questions, so hopefully I can achieve that next week. Speaking of next week… I am going to try and transcribe the first Peter Hendricks letter again… letter 15935… so... wish me luck!

[jamessilveirablog]

Week 3 Blog: The Great Letter

Welcome back! This week felt like my first official week at PRINT. Last week, I got the gist of what I will be doing this semester, so this week I started to dive into the project. I have been working on Endnote with Kailey, who will be helping me the most on the SAA team, and Adaeze, who is helping with SAA, also joined us on one occasion. I am starting to get the hang of Endnote, and after a couple of more sessions with Kailey, I will feel comfortable enough to try it on my own. Endnote has been going well, but I can not say the same for my first letter.

In my last blog, I mentioned how I was struggling with my first Peter Hendricks letter. I spent over 2 and a half hours on it and was not even halfway through it. I was advised to only take an hour and a half with letters, so I stopped working on it and brought it to the attention of Kayla, who is one of the team leads for PRINT’s transcription team, and Brendan, who has the most experience with Dutch handwriting and SAA. Brendan and I scheduled a meeting to go over the letter together and even he understood my confusion with it. Since there are no Dutch transcription workshops like there are with English and German letters, I learned so much while transcribing it with Brendan. I plan to meet with someone in SAA every week to go over letters in Dutch handwriting until I completely get the hang of it. During the meeting, he recommended that I try transcribing a different Peter Hendricks letter where the handwriting is less of a challenge to understand. Once I transcribe some easier Peter Hendricks letters, we will go back to this first letter I had a hard time transcribing.

It reached the point where Kailey, Adaeze, Brendan, Kayla, and even Dr. Beiler had gotten their hands on the letter. PRINT has a team meeting every Tuesday, so we talked about it. It made me feel better about myself and my transcription skills because I was not alone in struggling with it. Even though this letter was an intimidating introduction to Dutch handwriting, and I spent about 4 hours on it in total, working on it with people and figuring it out together was the highlight of my week. Once we got into the momentum of understanding it, it was fun figuring out all of the words and Peter Hendricks’ confusing but interesting way of spelling them. Thanks for tuning in! Let us see how this next letter goes!

[jamessilveirablog]

Week 2 Blog: The Overture

Welcome back to my blog! This week felt like the overture of my internship. It consisted of me learning the basics of what the semester will be like, and I am slowly but surely understanding my role at PRINT. In my last blog, I said I would go into more detail about it so this is that. To reiterate, I will mainly be cleaning up documents in a database called Endnote, while also transcribing letters. I received my internship workplan from Dr. Beiler, and I learned that I will be working with Linked Open Data (LOD) more than I thought. I am up for anything so I will happily take it on.

I will be working on Endnote, transcription, and LOD. I am still learning, but from my understanding thus far, Endnote is a database that is home to the skeletal metadata of the letters PRINT works with. Endnote includes important identification of letters such as the sender and receiver, the date it was written, and keywords so that letters are easier to find. I am responsible for documents numbered 1400-1551. My job is to clean up these documents, making sure people and place names are standardized and correct, proper protocols are being followed for how Endnote should be structured, and that all documents have at least one keyword. Organization is crucial to cleaning up Endnote.

Moving on to transcription, this is what I have the most experience in, as I volunteered for PRINT last semester solely learning how to format and transcribe letters. The thing is, those letters were in English with English handwriting. This semester, I am working with the Stadsarchief Amsterdam Archive (SAA) team, so I will be trying to transcribe letters in Dutch. I do not speak Dutch so this is definitely a challenge, but again, I am up for anything. This week, to ease me into it, I was given a letter to transcribe by Peter Hendricks, whose native language is Dutch but he also speaks English, so when he writes in English, he does so in his Dutch handwriting. He is the perfect starting point for Dutch transcription, but I am not used to how the Dutch write their letters, so it was a struggle to transcribe. When I get the hang of it eventually, which I will try my best, I will transcribe letters in the actual Dutch language. 

Now on to LOD, this is the term I am least familiar with. I only know the basis of it being more in-depth research on the people in the letters PRINT works with. I would be reading research files and filling in spreadsheets with the information I learned about these people. It is not the priority of my role in the SAA collection, so I have much to learn about it.

Thank you for reading my blog this week! That is everything I will be doing this semester at PRINT, and I will try not to feel too intimidated by it since I have people all around me on this team who can help me out. It is one of the reasons why I was determined to pursue an internship here, so I know I am in good hands.

[jamessilveirablog]

Week 1 Blog: The Introduction

Hi, welcome to my blog! My name is James Silveira, and I am a junior at UCF working towards my bachelor's degree. I aspire to be a film archivist, so I am studying film as my major and history as my minor. After my bachelor's, I plan on pursuing my master's degree in archival studies or library sciences. I am fascinated by film reels and the digitization of it. I find myself drawn to the historical and technical side of film more than the production and Hollywood glamor side of it. I hold cinema very close to my heart, and my dream is to preserve the art of film as my career.

I came across the P.R.I.N.T. (People, Religion, Information Networks, and Travel) project while researching archival-related internship and volunteering opportunities at UCF. PRINT traces and transcribes the letters of European religious minorities, such as Anabaptists, Quakers, and Pietists, and their migration flows in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. PRINT's goal is to make these letters and transcriptions accessible to everyone, helping preserve history for researchers and future generations. I sent an email to one of the founders of PRINT, Dr. Beiler, expressing my interest in the project. She was nothing but warm and welcoming, so I volunteered for PRINT throughout the fall 2024 semester in hopes of interning in the spring.

It is now the start of the spring 2025 semester, and I officially have an internship with the PRINT project. Transcription and document organization are skills that aspiring archivists should become well versed in, no matter the archiving field they want to pursue. This internship is a fantastic opportunity for me to understand the foundation of historical preservation and to learn even more about how important it is. After a semester of peaking into a project I have become so interested in, I am eager to finally fully dive into it.

For this semester, I will mainly be cleaning up documents in a database called Endnote, while also transcribing letters on the side. I will go into more detail about this in my next blog, so stay tuned for that. I hope this internship grants me some necessary skills I need to become a film archivist, and I hope I have fun doing so. There is a film scanner in the PRINT meeting room (which I have used and loved the time I spent with it), and whenever I take a glance at it, I see what my future holds, and I am immensely proud of myself for getting to be in the same room as it in the time to come.