FFSS Internship (Spring) Week 4

 Hello! Here is this week’s update on my internship with the Florida France Soldier Stories project:

This week has been entirely focused on editing the student submission Primary Source Packets for Dr. Lyons' upcoming podcast project in her undergraduate EUH3451 course. We need to have roughly fifteen packets ready by February 14 for the students to use as their guide for the podcast project. I am not sure how many packets we (meaning the graduate assistant, project manager, and myself) have worked on so far, but I believe we have all at least somewhat finished one each. We divided up five packets each to edit, so hopefully we can get through all of them by the deadline we set. I have worked through three of my five packets, although the editing process on those three is not yet completed. The editing process tends to be fairly slow, since there are multiple things that we need to check for and edit, then we have to send them to the project manager and then Dr. Lyons to look over. 

Because this project is still so new (this is the second semester), there is still a lot that needs to be done for the overall vision and progress of the project's structure. For example, we are currently editing these packets, and while we can look at the "model" packet we edited last semester, we are constantly changing the editing structure and formatting factors, so the model tends to become (sort of) useless when we are changing things so often. I realized that using the packet as a model was not very helpful, or at least no as helpful as I thought it would be, since there is so much subjective editing that needs to be done based on the sources available and what we can do with them. I am a little weary of the timeline of the editing process, because I feel as though the editing is never truly finished since the project is so new. Although these packets do not need to be exactly ready to publicly publish, there is still a lot that needs to be done consistently enough so that the students can use them appropriately. This is my most major concern, but I have hope that we will get everything done in time, since we are such a great team.  

On Wednesday (2/4), we had our weekly meeting to go over concerns and questions we had regarding our packets, and I think this conversation helped us figure out what still needed to be addressed in this process. A lot of our questions related to formatting issues we have noticed. For instance, it seems as though that between the three of us who are editing the packets tend to have slightly different ideas and ways of formatting the packets. I, specifically, focus on replicating the model packet, although this has had its faults. A lot of the time, also, I am going off of things that we discussed last semester, but I am not sure that we are all on the same page, especially since the graduate assistant is new this semester. It is things like this that I think gets in the way of our progress the most. However, our discussion today allowed us to iron some of these issues out, and I think we are all on a better page now. 

Since our deadline for the packets is coming up soon (roughly ten days), all of our focus will be on the packets. This is what I will be doing until then! 

See you next week!