2017 Publications Interns Share Their Experience | Pria Jackson

As a Publications Intern, I was one of three undergraduate students who were hired for the summer to work with Lenny Mueller and Matt Munson on the First Thousand Years of Greek Project, a digital humanities initiative to provide free, online access to a massive amount of Greek (and sometimes Latin) texts. Our days consisted of working with XML files pulled from the repository to make sure they were without textual or formatting errors. After a one day crash course in how to edit XML files in Oxygen, manipulate the files in Terminal, and how to communicate with an international team through GitHub, we spent the summer tackling a wide range of issues. If we hit a slow week, we were also invited to work on multiple other online digital humanities projects such as Lace: Greek OCR. The work was immensely satisfying because I knew that what we were doing would be directly helping future scholars by removing barriers to knowledge and the circulation of ideas. It was amazingly fun, varied, and challenging work. The workday was made even better by the fact that I got to work alongside brilliant scholars and tech magicians. The people I was fortunate enough to work alongside were what made the CHS such a welcoming space. Our conversations ranged from the political to the archaic to the nonsensical. There was rarely a dull moment and I am so glad to have met all the people that I did. I was happy to find that an integral part of the internship was getting the chance to explore D.C. Our supervisors expected us to be well-rounded individuals and encouraged us to not spend all of our summer working. I got plenty of time to master the Metro and explore D.C. We spent time at the Smithsonians, seeing the Library of Congress, rummaging through cozy used bookstore, and jogging through historic Georgetown. We even caught a ballgame, my first MLB game! I had a great time, and I hope my path leads back to the CHS again one day.

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