PRINT — Blog Post 1
Hello! I’m Joshua Benedict, a current student enrolled in the BA History program at UCF. If all goes well, Spring 2023 will be my last semester before I graduate. I have been at UCF for three years after transferring from Santa Fe College in Gainesville, but I am originally from the Orlando area. This semester, I am also an intern at UCF’s PRINT project, which is working to transcribe and analyze the letters of Christian religious minorities between North America and Northern Europe during the late 17th century, especially to better understand the dynamics of immigration among these communities.
This project is especially relevant to my interests as a student of both history and linguistics. As a matter of fact, my original plan when I graduated high school was to get an undergraduate degree in linguistics and enter the field of academic historical linguistics — I have since swapped to a degree in history with a minor in linguistics. It is fascinating to me to see not only how the more obvious aspects of language have changed over time, such as grammar (at the time the relevant letters were written, English still had a split between “thou” for singular and “you” for plural, similar to the distinction in French between tu and vous, for instance), but even such “mundane” aspects as the very way letters are written. I have already begun researching the paleographical skills required to assist with the transcription of these documents and improving the accessibility of the project’s transcription crowd-sources by writing subtitles for the YouTube videos meant to act as introductory tutorials.
Later on, I am hoping to gain skills relevant to archival sciences by working with such a large repository of scanned primary source documents. Processes such as the creation of Linked Open Data and other metadata for the documents, as well as other information about how data is not only collected, but preserved in such a way as to be useful later on, and especially how it can be shared with others (the public and academics alike), will be invaluable to my future goals in the archival field.
While it is hard to say, so early on, exactly how this semester will go in the regard of the skills I will find it necessary to learn and have the opportunity to practice, this certainly seems at the outset to be a particularly well-suited internship for me, and all the people involved with the project I have met so far have been wonderfully helpful! I’m very much looking forward to the rest of this semester!
