Round 2

I have finally finished my first round of adding keywords to my documents. So, I have started round two of doing this. When I first started adding keywords to the documents, I really jumped into it. Since starting the process of keyword standardization, I know that my understanding of some of the keywords and the documents has changed. I am curious to see what I will have to correct.

During this round of adding keywords, I will also be adding in mentions, which basically means I will be documenting on an Excel sheet when I come across extra names of people or places within the document. I will also be looking at some of the documents that have not been translated in “Documents of Brotherly Love”. Today I actually attempted some translation work.

Unfortunately, it took a lot longer than I thought it would. My goal was not to translate the whole letter, just parts where I could tell there was a person’s name, or a location mentioned. I thought it would not be too terrible because many of the letters that I have to look at actually have nicer handwriting since for the most part they were written by government officials.  This is a drastic difference from the Pemberton letters, which come from people of various education levels and there is no official standardization. However, I really underestimated the difference in the way certain letters were written in Dutch as opposed to English in the 1600s and 1700s.

One of my coworkers recently started working on a document to identify Dutch letters. I think I am going to have to ask him to give me a bit of a workshop so that I can start better identifying the correct letters. It is very difficult to use Google Translate or a Dutch dictionary when you are not confident about the spelling of the word you are trying to look up.

This week I did get to meet with yet another coworker to discuss keyword definitions and standardization. Next week the goal is to meet with one last person. We believe that she will be able to give a lot of insight into the keywords since she has been part of the project for so long. Then after that, we will show everything to Dr. Beiler to get her approval. I am very satisfied with how this semester is coming to a close.