Overall, how is it going?
As I head into the second half of my internship, I have reflected on the experience so far. I have been given a great space and a large amount of resources to grow as a historian. RRCHNM is a wonderful space to grow and have support always around. Here is how I used that with this internship.
What I Expected
was the basics of spreadsheet organization and setting up CSV’s to use the information later. Attempting to organize my information into the correct rows and columns, I was able to think about what I wanted this graph to show and adjust my cells from there.
I have also had experience in accessibility. In a previous post, I mentioned how accessibility can be difficult when we do not need those tools because we tend to not think about it for others. Starting with that base in this internship helped me not have to drown in hours of research on how to present my information to be better understood. In that post, I discussed what I had experience with personally and how I (or others) could use that moving forward in DH:
The best example for me personally is Alt Text under photos. I never thought about this necessity until recently and am still learning how to not overshare in them. My favorite example of mistakes in accessibility I struggle with is automatic generated captioning which are also know as #craptions because of how bad they turn out
This internship, so far, has allowed me to take what I already had a small understanding of and run with it. However, I did learn some new things too.
New Experiences
Oh boy did I not realize how long spreadsheeting takes when you do not have macros. New lesson learned, make macros to speed up the process. I began by “wasting” a ton of time messing with my cells and copying relevant information over to a new row. After some time of doing that, OpenRefine was my best friend. This software helped me to speed up the data cleaning side of the work. Cleaning included issues like typos, names spelled differently in the record, or parishes being called by a local name instead of the Crown authority name.
QGIS was an adventure to say the least. I had the smallest interaction with this mapping software before but not to this extent. My supervisor helped me a lot with understanding how to import the CSVs in a logical manner. Then, it was up to me to decide how to display the data in a way that made sense. A significant amount of time was spent on color and outlining style of the parishes for accessibility and presenting my argument. I created murders and other into separate maps solely because I do not know how to make it into one yet. But this is a great start!