For the past few weeks, I have worked on writing a reflection of my experiences thus far on the medart project. I did this partially as a way to wrap up my experiences this past semester and partially as a means to synthesize my work to make it more useful to the grant report.
To write my reflection, I started by going through any notes and spreadsheets I have saved to my computer and by going through my Constellation posts. The process of going through my old blog posts has been really useful for creating a comprehensive reflection. Being able to use the blog posts also helped me to see how important writing detailed blog posts was. As it were, I had a detailed record of everything I had done the past two semesters that I could work from.
I organized my reflection into five sections not including an introduction and conclusion. Each of the five sections was dedicated to one of the tasks I was assigned over the course of the past year. I lumped most of my earlier tasks like reading the grant, comparing file trees, and looking at the interview transcriptions into a section called “familiarization,” because each of these tasks were geared toward familiarizing me with medart. The remaining sections were “Metadata,” “The Wayback Machine,” “Finding Aids,” and “Urchin Reports.” In each section, I wrote about why the task was performed, what I did, any problems that were encountered, and what we discovered from this task. Hopefully, as a synthesis of the work I have done, this reflection will be useful to the grant report.
I also took some time to write an introduction for the finding aids I wrote this semester. The finding aids will be in the appendix of the grant report. In the introduction, I provided background information on why we decided we needed finding aids and on the different versions of medart stored in the hard drive. I then went on to explain my method when creating the finding aids and the challenges that stemmed from the lack of consistent organization in the medart directories. Finally, I explained how the finding aids were organized and the best way to navigate them.
After break, I will be returning in May after attending the 52nd International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI. I’m excited to talk with medievalists about what we have learned about medart and to hear Aisling and Alison present at their roundtable. During the summer semester, I look forward to working on the socio-technical roadmap for medart.