Stephanie Lawton
2015 Second Year Graduate Student, MA/PhD Program in Early American History, Documents Compass & Virginia Foundation for the Humanities
I worked on a project called "The People of the Founding Era: A Prosophographical Approach" which is researching everyone mentioned in the documentary editions of Founding Father's papers, as well as other document collections like the Eliza Pinckney Papers and Tim Costa's Geography of Slavery between the years 1713 and 1813. The focus of this project is to create a digital database recording every mention of these individuals in the sources and to collect a record for each person recording everything from their life dates to their visit for dinner with Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. For my first project, I created records for the wives of every Founding Father, defined as the men who signed the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and attended the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention. In my second project, I used a spreadsheet to sort through records that were being brought in from Eliza Pinckney's Papers and compared them to records we already had in our database to make sure that we didn't end up with duplicate records and to connect records that were duplicates. After I finished this process, the spreadsheet was sent to a computer programmer who had written a program to link any duplicate records and to automatically create all the new records. My third project was to revise the PFE training manual for interns and employees. I rearranged much of the material, added in new screenshots of the database, and clarified the many steps involved in creating and researching each person's record. Although I didn't really add much additional content, the manual ended up being 49 pages, instead of the initial 38 pages. Hopefully, it will still be easier to use, however. For my final project, I essentially did the work of an assistant manager, and began reviewing records that had problems the initial researcher could not fix. By the end of my internship, I had been involved in creating, editing, and processing over 2,000 records as well as revising the training manual.
This internship, as opposed to any previous internships, really gave me a lot more independence to determine how to do my work, to make decisions, and to make a really substantial contribution to the organization's work. I really felt that I was an equal partner in the project and that my coworkers and supervisor trusted me to make independent decisions. Of course, I also made sure not to abuse that trust and still asked for frequent input. Internships are also just a completely different experience from a classroom experience, as you aren't just reading books and writing papers, but having to really do the foundational work of a historian - reading through lots of different primary and secondary sources to hunt up very detailed information and apply it. You also don't have a professor setting out a certain syllabus or course requirements. As a result, you have to be much more self-actuated and create a good research process by yourself. So, my internship experience really moved beyond my classroom experience of reading and critiquing other historian's work to experiencing that sort of work for myself. It also required a great deal more intellectual flexibility, as in the space of a day I might work on over 10 different research projects, each one of which had different problems and used different sources. I really felt like a historical detective at this job, which was fun.