Name: Elizabeth Bailey
Class Year: 2027
Major: Linguistics, Classical Culture & Society
Internship Organization: Swarthmore College
Internship Title: “Language, Culture and History: Belize in a Digital Age” and “Creole Poetics & Subject-Formation in 20th Century Belize”
Location: Remote
What's happening at your internship? We would love to hear what kind of work you are doing!
I’m working remotely as a research assistant with a transnational team on a collaborative project coordinated by Prof. Fuller Medina, of Swarthmore College, and Prof. Christopher DeShield, of the University of Belize. It brings together two projects on poetry and the social history of Belize Kriol, with the aim of creating an open-access digital archive of 20th century written Belize Kriol in poetry found in newspapers from Belize, which are currently located in the Belize Archives and Records Service. My tasks include running and manually correcting OCR of scanned text and conducting bibliographic research. I also work with metadata for the texts and assist with organizing the information to make it easier to work with.
Why did you apply for this internship?
I am a linguistics student, so I was excited to find an opportunity relating to language. I also sought a position that would help me improve my research skills and that would give me a chance to work with professional academic linguists.
What is something you have learned from your internship that you didn't expect?
I knew that I should expect to work on the computer, since it is a remote position, and I knew that I might have to learn new programs and systems in order to complete my work. However, I hadn’t quite prepared myself for the process of learning these systems. It made me confront how often I choose to do a task the longer or less efficient way to avoid having to navigate an unfamiliar computer tool. Being required to use new programs gave me the motivation to get over my wariness. I’e been making good use now of Bryn Mawr’s access to Zotero and Adobe Acrobat, and I’m surprised at how much less confusing they have ended up being compared with my expectations.
Working remotely for the first time? What has that experience been like for you?
One thing that working remotely has taught me is that there is definitely a time and a place for a long, detailed, specific email. After years of school training me out of being into a very condensed, punchy style, I’m finding that my somewhat-forgotten skills in making sure I leave no stone unturned are useful again. It’s important to maintain good written communication when working remotely, and this includes a lot of detailed emailing to clarify details of assignments and provide updates for ongoing tasks. You have to remember not to leave out a detail that you perceive as unimportant, but that everyone else involved actually needed to know. Online meetings have also been very important, and a year of remote school during the pandemic definitely helped prepare me for the slight awkwardness of talking to a person’s face when that person isn’t actually in front of you.