kitewithfish (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kitewithfish) wrote2008-02-15 11:04 am
kitewithfish) wrote2008-02-15 11:04 am
(no subject)
I'm feeling remiss about my level of laziness re:posting lately.
So, my internship puts me physically in the Diocesan Archive of St. Pölten, a small city in Austria. They've got records here going back several hundred years, and there seems to be a distinct geological bent to their work here.
What I am actually doing is being an intern for a program being run by these people, but as an outside project. Monasterium.net is meant to be an online archive of the documents of the many monasteries, archives, and libraries of central Europe, allowing academics to get at this stuff much more easily. So, this is actually very cool, in that they are putting some very old documents out there for the first time online, and this could really make historical work a lot cheap and faster for people.
The practical side of this is that there is a lot of grunt work to do: scanning and maintaining the website, as well as translating as much as possible into as many languages as possible. The main stuff is all done in German, and they're the English portion of the thing together for the first time through me. I'm very useful, all of a sudden.
The train ride is about 40 minutes, and the walk to work is very, very easy. I've been doing it everyday for a week now, and aside from a screw-up on the first day that landed me here about an hour late, things have been going well. The main boss of the project is on vacation this week, which means I am currently sitting at his desk, using his computer while I should be doing work on the online database (mostly consists of linking pictures to descriptions about those pictures. Very monotonous, really, but cannot be done on my computer as I don't have access to the databases.)
The commute means that I have to get up very early for me: 6am, and out the door by 6.45am. It's doable, but the first three days were just mechanically dull for me. Now I'm getting my feet back under me again. It's also made my social life a little slow.
I did have dinner with N and some of her floormates last night, who were amused by a) me speaking German with an American accent, and b) the fact that N and I would speak to each other in German, despite the fact that English is (functionally) our native language. (I tend to always speak in German, mostly because it's hard on my brain to switch back and forth all the time, and also I feel it's rude to speak in a foreign language in front of other people when you can help it. I certainly find it distracting and sometimes a little annoying.)
So, my internship puts me physically in the Diocesan Archive of St. Pölten, a small city in Austria. They've got records here going back several hundred years, and there seems to be a distinct geological bent to their work here.
What I am actually doing is being an intern for a program being run by these people, but as an outside project. Monasterium.net is meant to be an online archive of the documents of the many monasteries, archives, and libraries of central Europe, allowing academics to get at this stuff much more easily. So, this is actually very cool, in that they are putting some very old documents out there for the first time online, and this could really make historical work a lot cheap and faster for people.
The practical side of this is that there is a lot of grunt work to do: scanning and maintaining the website, as well as translating as much as possible into as many languages as possible. The main stuff is all done in German, and they're the English portion of the thing together for the first time through me. I'm very useful, all of a sudden.
The train ride is about 40 minutes, and the walk to work is very, very easy. I've been doing it everyday for a week now, and aside from a screw-up on the first day that landed me here about an hour late, things have been going well. The main boss of the project is on vacation this week, which means I am currently sitting at his desk, using his computer while I should be doing work on the online database (mostly consists of linking pictures to descriptions about those pictures. Very monotonous, really, but cannot be done on my computer as I don't have access to the databases.)
The commute means that I have to get up very early for me: 6am, and out the door by 6.45am. It's doable, but the first three days were just mechanically dull for me. Now I'm getting my feet back under me again. It's also made my social life a little slow.
I did have dinner with N and some of her floormates last night, who were amused by a) me speaking German with an American accent, and b) the fact that N and I would speak to each other in German, despite the fact that English is (functionally) our native language. (I tend to always speak in German, mostly because it's hard on my brain to switch back and forth all the time, and also I feel it's rude to speak in a foreign language in front of other people when you can help it. I certainly find it distracting and sometimes a little annoying.)