Week 8

This week with the Quarterly we are just a few weeks out from the Shofner Lecture and we are now beginning to finalize everything and get everything ready. I continue to do my work editing articles and am noticing that the work I am doing editing the articles is crossing over into my own work and helping me to evolve my writing style through seeing several different styles of writing being produced by professionals in the field. The database continues to grow and I am finding it harder and harder to find more professionals in the field of Florida History. I still maintain my goal of 100 and hope to achieve it by the end of the semester.

Week 7: Working towards the Guest Lecture

This week in the Quarterly I continued to work on editing articles for publication. The more I edit the more I realize that there really isn't a true set of rules as far as writing is concerned. In most regards there is an almost fluid set of concepts that can be formed into whatever particular style the author is writing. This really helps me in regards to my own work because it allows me to see professional writers and the many different styles that exist within the realm of academic writing in the field of History. Also I put together a program for the Florida Historical Quarterly's Jerrell Shofner Lecture Series that is coming up in a few weeks. This is just another aspect of the journal that I am learning how to do. I feel over the last few weeks I have been working to try and improve the accessibility to the Quarterly from the general public and that this will help the Quarterly in the long run.

Week 6

This week in my internship I continued to work on creating abstracts. In addition to this I created a database style organization for the abstracts to be stored in as there are a lot of them. This project is very interesting to me and there are discussions about how it could be used for a mapping project of the Florida Historical Quarterly. There are many different aspects involved in the publication of an academic journal and I am learning more and more about how it works. This internship is benefiting me in so many more ways than I expected.

Week 5 - A new assignment

During this week of my internship my job took on a different aspect. The Florida Historical Quarterly is attempting to make it easier for people to find their information online. In order to do this someone will have to review the articles and make abstracts as well as pull out keywords for searches. I am already currently using articles from the Quarterly for my personal work so I am going to start working with those articles and try to set up some kind of template to be used for the abstracts to make them easier to compile and find later on. This new assignment will really benefit me in my ability to synthesize information and create abstracts for when I need to do so later on in my career.  In addition, I continue my work with the Database and expanding its contacts. Hopefully all of this hard work will pay off when the website is created and I can upload all of this information for others to use.

What I Learned This Week - On a different aspect of the workings of an academic journal I learned that the online component of the journals can be very difficult for people to navigate and that making an abstract and keywords might help people locate what they are looking for faster and easier.

Week 4 - The Editing continues

  This week with the FHQ I continued to work on proof editing articles for the journal. I am coming to realize the type of editing needed to be done on articles and how it differs from the editing I did on book reviews earlier in the internship. This experience is really opening my eyes to all the things that go into the creation each journal publication. In addition to that I continue to work on expanding the database. This week I also worked on converting the spreadsheet into a different format to make it more user friendly for the future. It is a working progress, but I feel confident that it will turn out the way I want it to.

What I Learned - There is large difference between the way someone edits a book review and the way someone edits an article

Week 3 - Getting in the Grove of Things

On the third week of my Internship with the Florida Historical Quarterly I really settled into my position. I continued to do work in proof editing of articles for the journal. I also continued to work on the database getting even closer to my goal of 100 listed contacts. In speaking with Dr. Murphree I am also trying to put together an instructional meeting with him for next week to discuss Facebook and how the FHQ Facebook can be used to further help promote the journal.  In addition I am creating a Drop box system to present at our meeting in the near future. I believe it could really help the efficiency of the inner workings of the journal.

 

What I learned This Week:  There are a lot of people that work outside the state of Florida that study Florida history to some extent.

Week 2 - Where the heck do you put a comma.

This is week two of my internship and the work load picked up this week. I was given the Index for the current issue of the Quarterly to compose. I was also given an article to review and make changes as I saw fit. Through working on all the reviews the last two weeks I have come to a realization that I had not previously considered. The use of a comma in the academic writing I was reviewing was much different than that of what I would use in my own work. For example, there would be a comma around the word and. I was taught all growing up that this was a strict rule that you do not do that. It was an eye opening experience that may seem trivial to most, but will impact my future writings for sure.  I was doing this all while still working on collecting more information for the database. I have worked on compiling the information I am gathering through this database into something more user friendly that could possibly be put on a website to help other students find and contact professionals that  focus, to some extent, on florida topics. This is all still a working process. I completed the Index and am finishing up the article I was given. I am also still further working with Dr. Lester and Dr. Murphree on the guest lecture and coordinating anything I can help with it.

What I Learned This Week:
This week I learned that within the workings of an academic journal there are several reviews done of the work, not only for continuity reasons, but for grammatical reasons as well.
I also learned this week that there is a huge variation on the use of commas in the academic world and that the age of the writer and the writers style can completely change the way an author uses commas within their work. It's something I have just never considered before. The rules with commas are much more fluid than I previously thought.