This final reflection for the 2019 Fall internship covers what I have learned from this experience – what I have gained as a writer, soon-to-be-graduate, researcher, and what skill sets, competencies, and experiences were gained – its challenges and successes. This internship required a great deal of data entry and, while I was passionate about the overall goal and capacity that the information would bring to Dr. Stone project… It was agonizing; however, such is the reality of research – which I suppose is the grand take way this semester – Someone has to do the tabulating.

At the beginning of the semester I figured I could leverage my previous professional and academic experience by transferring the information to a more robust Structured Query Language (SQL) database solution. This would hopefully limit the amount of ‘coding’ needed to create useful returns on data correlation, it would be faster, portable, and be able to be accessed and  managed through Excel; however, it would then require the instruction to others in how to actually connect to, add information (should I end the semester with the tasks midway to completion; And while there are plugins for Excel that allow a user to connect to a mySQL database, I was wary of add additional complexity to the project.

Additionally, it was mentioned in the first meeting of the semester that another intern would be tasked with searching through physical reports to the Governor of Alaska as no digital copies had been located. I took this statement as true stated that I may be able to provide a solution – digitize the physical copies. This would be a back burner passion – to be worked on should any free time appear. The ended solution could by no means be used in an organization that could afford a proper commercial book scanner; however, as the solution used technology on had of the average citizen, namely an (preferably two) Android device(s) with a 12mp or larger camera, it could be used in rural applications were neither budget, location, nor special technology provide a means of another solution. The report can be found here. However, near the end of the semester another online resource was found – the Orbis Cascade Alliance’s Archive West. This archive consortium, focusing on correspondence, diaries, and manuscripts, had digital copies for download – these were added to the Text Library – though, as it was near the end of the semester, they were not able to be utilized.

The initial main tasks of the semester were to continue where Rose Kruger left off – complete a list of educators as they appear with Reports to the Commissioner of Education – These were to be tabulated along with their denomination, place of origination, their station, years present, their position, and miscellaneous notes. Once rows, which included the same name but different years, were combined there were over 300+ unique entries.

The next step was to compile a list of archive repositories which would have collections or entries pertinent to the thematic trends found in the Spring Internship 2019 Text Library or individuals included in the Educators listing.

Initial progress was very slow; however, the Alaska State Archive had a very useful guide to repositories/collections on Alaska Indigenous and denominations. For not having dived deep into actual archive research, apart from your basic undergraduate research, this document was nothing short of my Rosetta Stone – it was absolutely priceless in its purpose to act as a starting place for compiling. More than just a starting point, there were few archive found outside the Alaska State’s report that could include additional entries – only two were located and one found promising; the aforementioned Orbis Archive. The more robust system included UAF’s archive with the returns being able to be exported out in comma delaminated for – to be then imported into the main document. The most restrictive among the archives would be UAA’s WordPress based archive search which supported little more than basic keyword and string searches. However, it was later found that a portion of my research method was flawed – my search queries for educators was too restricted – resulting in possibly overlooked information that would be useful to future research. Dr. Stone recommended abandoning the date range or at least increased the end date range far beyond 1902 – but this exponentially increased the number of returns and slowed down research.

Research and tabulating took a great deal of time – in fact at the end of this semester the task is not yet complete. This frustratingly would consume precious work hours. Dr. Stone was understanding – “Welcome to research”; I suppose this is the case when undertaking an unfamiliar method, even as simple as menial data entry and search queries; hours of work can be quickly made irrelevant upon the realization that the structured design of the document or the research queries were flawed. While Dr. Stone understands that it would be a possibility that the task would be incomplete – It was a personal goal of mine to have this complete and I find it very frustrating to leave this project incomplete.

Once a decent table had been created I grew weary of looking at the sum of information in text form – given its growing size, it was getting difficult to follow it all – and opted to create a Google Map which presented the same data in an interactive map. The map can be viewed here:

I created an addendum to the original ‘Accessing & Managing StoneCorp’ which included additional information into the structure and means of accessing the list of educators and Itinerary, how it was created, and the folder/file hierarchy. These documents are simple in their purpose and design but are reflective of a great deal of time and effort.

I am thankful for the competencies I gained during this internship. Through the reflection papers and weekly check-in meetings with Dr. Stone, I became more comfortable in participating, discussing, research methods; additionally, I found my pace in meeting quality and time deadlines – avoiding the large bursts of productivity leading to fatigue and burnout.