Collaboration

Over the course of this week, I got to work on a few different projects. Much like the last few weeks, I of course looked through the documents and added keywords to several of them. I am actually almost finished with my first round of keywords. I’m excited to go back to the beginning because the documents I am looking at focus mostly on the same group of people, the Palatine Mennonites, over the course of several decades. So now that I know how their situation ends, I think it will be interesting to see the beginning of their struggles.

Reading the documents in my section, I also tend to see some of the same recurring names and have grown familiar with several of them.  So this week, it caught me a bit off guard reading letters that stated that two major characters whose writings I have read, had passed away, despite knowing that everyone I am reading about has long been gone.

With adding the keywords, lately, there have been talks about standardizing the definition of the keywords and writing them down so that everyone has a reference that they can look at. The co-worker and I who agreed to take on that job both finished writing the initial definitions this week. So, we decided it was time to start meeting with the other team members in order to form some kind of consensus. We got the chance to sit down and meet with one of the database groups this week. We went over all the keywords with them and altered the definitions as needed. It was a nice change of pace doing some collaboration work. I look forward to meeting with the other four database groups over the next few weeks before presenting our official conclusion.

This week, I also briefly worked on the design for the infographic on the religious groups within P.R.I.N.T. It had been a while since I had messed with it and it was fun doing some creative work. It is definitely work I enjoy doing, adding keywords is just the priority. Hopefully, I’ll be able to continue this summer and finish the infographic project.