Lukas Kaiser's History Internship Blog
PRINT - FALL 2025
Week 1 Blog: Introduction
8/22/25
Hello, my name is Lukas Quang Kaiser. I am a History Major at the University of Central Florida, and I have recently begun my senior year. For this semester, I chose to sign up to work as an intern for PRINT, a digital humanities project focusing on the lives of European religious minorities in the early modern period. My personal research interests include medieval and early modern Europe, the latter of which is what is covered by the research being done by PRINT. Through this internship, I hope to gain valuable experience with the subject of history as a profession, so that I have a better understanding of what I want to do after I graduate next year. I also hope to gain experience in working in a professional environment with a team of my peers, as well as with working with languages and styles of writing that I am unfamiliar with, such as Dutch and older forms of English.
Because of an unfortunate timing issue with my schedule, I was unable to attend the first weekly meeting on Tuesday to meet the rest of the PRINT team, but I was at least able to have my meeting later in the day with Dr. Beiler and my supervisor Kayla. I was given a quick tour of where I would be working during the week, and on Friday I had a second meeting with my supervisor on a multitude of things including my first transcription assignment and setting up my schedule for the coming week, both of which I plan to start on after I finish up this post. Overall, despite still being very new to this internship and how it works, I feel that I am mostly prepared to tackle it, and I cannot wait to get started in earnest.
Week 2 Blog:
The Actual First Week
8/29/25
Even though last week was technically my first week in this internship, this was the week where I actually began to not only work, but also take part in a few group activities, so I thought of this week more as my first week at PRINT. During the prior weekend and throughout the week, I worked on transcribing letters written in older English, and by the time of writing, I had completed and turned in three for feedback from my supervisor.
It was during this week that I also met more of the PRINT team through the Tuesday morning meeting, which unfortunately I was only able to attend for fifteen minutes since I do have a lecture for another class to go to during that time, but I was able to introduce myself to everyone, and I was able to learn more about who I would be working alongside during the semester.
On Wednesday, I also attended a Dutch Transcription Workshop over Zoom, in which Dr. Beiler led a small number of students, including myself, in transcribing a letter in Dutch that referenced the persecution of Anabaptists in the Netherlands. The majority of us were not fluent in Dutch, so we were focusing on reading out the individual letters of different words and then transcribing them for later. I took part in reading and transcribing Dutch writing, and even though there were similarities in the individual letters to the older forms of English that I had been reading and transcribing throughout the week, I still found the process quite difficult. I was in need of quite a bit of help in understanding the shapes of certain letters. It was almost to the point that I was worried about going too slowly for my teammates, but I highly doubt that was the case.
Overall, I think the first week of doing work for my internship went quite well, and I am still very optimistic about what is coming next for me in the following weeks. During the weekend, I plan on returning to the three transcriptions that I had been working on and altering them according to the feedback from my supervisor. I was also told to expect assignments that are not solely transcriptions soon. I have no idea what those assignments will be, but I honestly am excited to find out. Until then, it would be perfecting the formatting of my transcriptions for me.
Week 3: Pushing On Forwards
9/4/25
This week was pretty similar to the last one. For one, I have completed another three transcriptions, and I would have liked to work on more, though unfortunately, I have temporarily run out of new letters to work on, but this will not be the case for much longer, thankfully. Once again, I attended the weekly Dutch Transcription Workshop over Zoom, where I helped with transcribing Dutch words. Unlike last time, I was a little more efficient with transcribing individual letters, so I would say I am beginning to get the hang of it.
I have encountered some difficulties when it came to transcribing, however. The biggest one was in a 1652 letter between Francis Howgill and Margaret Fell, in which I found a technically legible section, but I could not figure out what many of the actual letters were, nor what the two words that they spelled meant. Even my more experienced teammate was not able to decipher it. Ultimately, I chose to move on and wait until after it was reviewed by my supervisor, after I turned it in for feedback. In my experience, it is much better to move on to work on what you do know, versus getting stuck on a single thing that you do not.
A rather interesting tidbit of information that I noticed in one of the letters I was transcribing was in a 1690 letter between members of the Quakers and the Dutch Anabaptists, which mentions two groups referred to as the "Albigentes" and "Waldenses". I am already aware of who the latter are, being the Waldensians, a religious group that was created during the 12th Century that would go on to influence future Protestant groups. It is the "Albigentes" that caught my attention, as it made me think of the Albegenses, otherwise known as the Cathars, who were a Christian group centered in southern France with Gnostic beliefs, and whose opposition to the Catholic Church led to them being violently persecuted by the Albigensian Crusade and the Inquisition. I'm curious as to whether this "Albigentes" are related to the Cathars, or if they are merely a different group with a similar name.
Overall, this was another great week working for PRINT, and I am looking forward to new assignments to work on. So far, it has been getting easier, but I am anticipating more difficult tasks.
On a final note, a good number of my peers in the PRINT team are actually working remotely this semester, so I will not be meeting them in person. As for the ones working in the office itself, I know one of them pretty well from a previous class, and as for the others, I will see whether or not I have any significant interactions with them in the coming weeks.
Week 4: Complications Within and Beyond the Pages
9/12/25
The fourth week involved more transcribing, and as I had expected I received more challenging work. The major challenge that I had to face while transcribing involved the journal from where I had been taking the already-transcribed lines from. If I haven't mentioned it before on my blog posts, my job largely involves taking the already existing transcriptions and editing the format as well as any mistakes in order to fit PRINT's chosen formatting. The problem was that some of the new journals were missing lines, so far as little as four and as many as twelve. Because of that, I would have to try and transcribe them from scratch, with varying success. Some of the individual letters of writing could be very difficult to make out, though as I get better at it, I hope that I will be able to fill in the missing sections at a much more efficient and accurate rate.
Besides having to make transcriptions of the letters from scratch when the situation called for it, my only other challenge for this week was a technical difficulty I had while trying to attend the weekly Dutch Transcription Workshop over Zoom, as my internet shut down not once, but twice on me, forcing me out of the call. It proved to just be a minor inconvenience, however. I was able to let Dr. Beiler know about my internet problems through a friend that was also in the call, and she was understanding. I was able to overcome my internet issues quite easily and I was able to rejoin the call for the remainder of the session. However, this incident does serve as a good reminder that technical difficulties are going to occur within professional settings, and that I will have to be ready for them in the future.
Other than that, the week has been very quiet, and even through my progress has slowed slightly due to the difficulty of transcribing some of the new letters I've been working on, I still managed to get almost three letters done. I am also continuing to manage my time wisely, which is part of the reason that I am still able to get a decent amount of work done. It is very clear to me that I still have a lot to learn, and I am still very excited to continue doing so as I work for PRINT.
Week 5: All Quiet
9/19/25
The fifth week working at PRINT was pretty similar to the previous one. The letters I have been working on have been somewhat more difficult due to the journals' lack of complete transcriptions, which meant I had to transcribe a significant number of lines from scratch, which helped slow down my progress. Sadly, I am still having to leave out some words due to being unable to figure out some or all of the letters being written. The tricky part of transcribing the letters is that the handwriting of the authors and how they write certain letters varies often, and I have to pay attention to how they are being written so I can use them in reference when I find I word that I have trouble understanding. Still, I have managed to finish one long letter and one relatively short letter this week, and I have started on another letter that seems to have a more complete pre-existing transcription, so all I will have to do for most of it is just transcribe it in a way that matches the format for the PRINT project.
Just like last week, I also experienced a couple of technical difficulties while trying to take part in the online Dutch Transcription Workshop, as my internet connection chose to fail on me not once, but twice. Fortunately, it was slightly less disruptive this time, as all it took was a couple of resets of a nearby router to get reconnected, so I only lost a few minutes of my meeting that time.
Also, I did get an answer from one of my teammates on the use of the term "Albigentes" in a letter I read during my third week of working at PRINT. Apparently, Albigentes, as well as "Cathar" would go on to describe any "heretical" Christian group, and not just the actual Cathar movement of the High Middle Ages. The term Albigentes was likely being used to describe Quakers, since Quakers were regarded by a lot of Christian groups as heretics, and thus the usage of "Albigentes" in the letter. I figured it was unlikely that the "Albigentes" being described in the letter had anything to do with the Cathars, who themselves had been wiped out by the Albigensian Crusade in the early 13th Century, but I still find what I learned very interesting.
Going into the next week, I will continue to work on the last letter I worked on this week, and hopefully, my internet will not continue to fail me.
Week 6: "Fun" with Folders, Files, and the Germans
9/26/25
The sixth week of my internship at PRINT was fairly quiet, as was last week, with few changes, though that could change. I discussed with my supervisor and with Dr. Beiler about possibly doing a "mini-bio" for one of the individuals mentioned by the letters that I have been transcribing for the last five weeks. It is an assignment that I am already familiar with, as I had already completed one while I was taking Dr. Beiler's "Professionalizing History Majors" back in the Spring of 2024. I may very well accept the offer to make one, as though I am quite comfortable doing transcriptions, it would be a benefit for my internship experience to diversify my work.
One issue that I had been encountering while finding new letters to work on transcribing was that the Excel spreadsheet that showed what letters were available was not in the folder that I was directed to work out of. I brought this up to my supervisor and Dr. Beiler, and after making a short list of the letters that I could not find, I was then shown a different folder in which the letters I could not find did exist, so now I can work on them, one of which I completed moments before writing this very blog entry.
I am pretty happy to report that I did not suffer from any internet issues while participating in my Dutch Transcription Workshop over Zoom this week. Something interesting about it for this week is that we spent about half the time trying out doing a transcription of a letter written in German, instead of the usual Dutch. It quickly became apparent to me, as well as the rest of my coworkers, that it was much harder to read German writing when compared to Dutch. I myself knew for certain that I would take a very long time to get through a single sentence, as even my more experienced coworkers were struggling to read the handwriting. Fortunately, Dr. Beiler had us move on to working on a letter in Dutch. Clearly, German is going to be beyond me for quite some time.
I typically work in the office that PRINT is based out of two days a week, with the rest of my work being done at home, and as of writing this entry, it is the latest I have been at almost 6 in the evening. I really want to get my last letter done before I go home. It will be the last day of September when I come back next week, and I honestly look forward to it. This experience so far has been fun, if occasionally tedious.
Week 7: New Project
10/3/25
It is the end of the seventh week of my internship at PRINT, and things are more or less the same. As expected, I have a plethora of new letters that I was not aware that I had access to until last week to work on. Since many of them had more pre-existing transcriptions, I was able to complete more of them. By Thursday evening, I had transcribed four letters and was halfway through a fifth. Of course, said pre-existing transcriptions were not one hundred percent completed, with a varying number of missing lines, so I still had some work to do transcribing as many of them as I could from scratch.
On Wednesday, I attended the Dutch Transcription Workshop as per usual. One of my coworkers who usually attended them was absent that day, which meant that there were only three of us transcribing, and that led to me doing a little bit more that hour than usual, which I did not mind. The letter itself was quite interesting, as the writer was talking about a religious group called the Mennonites, and how their members were being subject to persecution, with a large group of them being marched from the city through the mountains to another, and it would be there that they would be subjected to enslavement to labor aboard galleys. Unfortunately, I cannot remember the specifics, such as the names of the cities mentioned in the letter, but I found it to be very interesting, if not also tragic, for the Mennonites. From what I know about galley slavery, to say it is an unpleasant experience would be an incredible understatement.
The most important part of my week has been that I am now on the way to beginning work on a mini-bio for PRINT, which I mentioned in my post from last week. The person that I will be researching is named Samuel Watson, and just like how I did with a Pennsylvanian Quaker named Randal Blackshaw back in my class with Dr. Beiler, I will be using any written sources referencing Watson that I can find in order to piece together a consistent narrative of his life. Based on my experience, such sources can include letters mentioning him, transcriptions of meetings that mention him being present, wills, records of baptisms, and so on. It could end up being a daunting task as was my biography for Blackshaw, as the number of available reliable records on relatively ordinary people tend to be slim, and those that do exist can be hard to access or may even beyond my ability to effectively read, but I am still quite excited to get started on it. Because of the new project, there is a chance that I will not be able to complete as many transcriptions, but I would still like to get at least one completed each week if I can.
Week 8: Slow Reading and Slight Slip-ups
10/10/25
The first half of the eighth week of working for PRINT was relatively the same, as I was finishing up transcriptions that I had already started on. It was on Thursday that I began some work on doing research on Samuel Watson for the mini bio that I plan on doing on him. To start, I took a crack at transcribing the letter that I was given that mentions him. More specifically, it is a letter being written to him by notable English Quaker leader George Whitehead. The challenge behind working on this letter comes from the fact that, as far as I know, there is no pre-existing transcription of the letter, or at least that I know of after trying to find one within the Journal of the Friends Historical Society, which, in case I have not mentioned already, has been the source for the transcriptions of letters that I have been using. On the bright side, I did find a secondary source on Samuel Watson while I was trying to find a transcription of the letter.
One frustrating aspect of transcribing is that it is very easy to get stuck. Sometimes there will be words that are completely and utterly illegible, due to some outside source damaging the letter itself. Other times, I will find words that I just personally find difficult to read, and it is then that I will seek help from others. One of my coworkers and I took over five minutes just to figure out that a letter we were both confused about was just the letter 'L'. I will continue to transcribe the Whitehead-Watson letter, but I am considering taking a break from transcribing to do other research on Samuel Watson, such as looking for primary sources that I can access.
My slip-up for this week was forgetting about and missing the weekly Dutch Transcription Workshop over Zoom on Wednesday. Fortunately, there are not going to be any serious consequences for doing this, but it is something that I would rather not repeat. One day, when I have a real job, I will most likely not be able to get away with that, so I do not want to get in the habit of it.
Besides starting on my Samuel Watson project and missing the Dutch Transcription Workshop, this week has not been very unusual. Hopefully, finding information on Watson won't be too hard, but if my last mini-bio is anything to go off of, I have a feeling that it could be a challenge.
Week 9: Slow Progress is Still Progress
10/17/25
It is the end of my ninth week of working for PRINT, and despite my intention to, I have not truly begun searching the internet for any major primary or secondary sources on Samuel Watson for the miniature biography that I plan on doing for him. It is partially because I have been very wrapped up in reading the letter I have been transcribing, as it is most likely the most lengthy letter I have transcribed so far. I was mistaken in believing that the writer of the letter was George Whitehead, and that it was addressed to Samuel Watson. Somehow I had gotten it mixed up, and in fact that the letter is being written BY Samuel Watson TO George Whitehead. This is overall a good thing, as any information that I find in the letter could give more insight to Watson's life at the time of writing, but this comes with the downside that I now absolutely cannot allow too many portions of the letter to go untranscribed. Luckily, I have transcribed the vast majority of Watson's letter to Whitehead, with only a few words that I as well as my coworker Kailey have been unable to decipher. For those words, I will most likely have to rely on help from Dr. Beiler herself, who was able to, very quickly I might add, help me with some words that I had been unable to figure out last week.
I almost missed my Dutch Transcription Workshop again. I was in the middle of running a quick errand when I recieved a message referencing the meeting. Fortunately, I was still able to attend the meeting, though I was still over fifteen minutes late. For next week, I will be setting an alarm on my phone to go off on Wednesday so that I am unable to forget again.
Besides the letter written by Samuel Watson, I only did one other trancription this week, for which I was aided by a pre-existing transcription that was only missing fifteen or so lines. Compared to the Watson letter, it felt like a break, but it is also one of the very last letters that is aided by a pre-existing transcription that is not missing more than twenty lines of text. If I continue with other transcriptions, I will be working either with letters coupled with transcriptions missing around thirty to fifty or so lines, or with letters that do not have pre-existing transcriptions at all, the latter being something that many who have worked on the PRINT project are used to, and soon, I will have to be as well. If there is one thing that this internship is teaching me at all, is to be patient. While I will not be making progress on my work as fast as I have been a few weeks ago, I will still be making progress now.
Week 10: Ireland's Samuel Watson, or Yorkshire's Samuel Watson?
10/24/25
It is the end of my tenth week working for PRINT, and I have now made substantial progress on doing research for my Mini Bio on Samuel Watson. First of all, the incredibly long letter that he wrote to George Whitehead that I have been transcribing has almost been completed, though I chose to take a small break from it so that I could focus on research through the usage of primary and secondary sources. I have been given access to an account on www.FindMyPast.com, a British genealogy website that seems to have a good amount of Quaker records, so I had a lot to work with. However, it is here that I made two very large mistakes. The first was not checking the notes already made on Samuel Watson by my coworkers that had been posted onto Microsoft Teams, and my second mistake was trying to find Samuel Watson despite not consulting the provided notes. This led me to waste time researching a Quaker named Samuel Watson who had moved from Great Britain to Ireland, instead of the Samuel Watson that I was supposed to be researching, who had lived in Yorkshire, England, the latter Watson being the writer of the letter that I had been transcribing. After clearing things up with Dr. Beiler and by coworker Adaeze, I got to work using the provided notes as a guideline, accessing both books and documents that had been marked on the notes, as well as using them to search for primary sources on Samuel Watson and his family on FindMyPast, including himself, his wife, his daughter, his two stepdaughters, and his in-laws.
Samuel Watson has been a fairly interesting figure to research, having been convinced to join the Society of Friends while imprisoned with them in York Castle on charges unrelated to the Quakers, and after his release, he dedicated his life to helping them as a missionary, despite facing persecution, violence, and even threats of death. I was also reminded that I should be happy not to have been born back then, as Watson unfortunately outlived his daughters and his wife. I had a similar experience when researching Randal Blackshaw during my class with Dr. Beiler, though unlike Watson, Blackshaw had many more children, and at least two of them lived to an old age, though many more died even younger than Watson's children had.
This is the first week that I have not turned in a transcription, as I have put my entire focus on the Samuel Watson project. Before I start on any new letter, I would like to at least finish Watson's letter to Whitehead.
Week 11: Drafting, Citing, More Transcribing
10/31/25
It is the end of my eleventh week of working for PRINT, and I have now finished my rough draft for the Samuel Watson Mini-Bio. The process for researching and writing about the life of Samuel Watson was a fun, if not also frustrating, process. The fun part came from taking information from secondary sources and using it to find the original records on FindMyPast.com, which are not only more concrete than secondary sources, but they also often show more specific information, such as the exact date that someone was married or passed away. I found that marriage records were the most plentiful of records to draw upon, as I was able to find one for Samuel Watson himself when he married Mary Monk, as well as marriage records for his two stepdaughters, Mary and Elizabeth. What was frustrating was that there were records that I wanted to find, but the website's database did not have them. This includes a primary source on the birth and death of Samuel Watson, which I was unable to find, so I will have to rely solely upon the secondary sources mentioning Samuel Watson. I was at least able to find a baptism and death record for Grace, who was Watson's daughter with Mary Monk. I was also unable to find mention of what Watson actually did for a living before he met the Quakers at the age of 34, while he was imprisoned at York Castle, though I do have enough secondary information to assume that he was a farmer of some sort.
As for the letter that I had been transcribing, that was written by Watson, I ultimately chose not to use it for my project. One, because I was unable to transcribe a very large part of it, but the information I could get does not seem like it will be beneficial for my Mini-Bio.
Using what information I had obtained, I have made a rough draft on the life of Samuel Watson, which, while it does not have nearly as much detail on himself and his family as I would like, I am still moderately happy with the result. Besides researching and drafting this week, I have also started on a new transcription for a non-Watson-related letter. Hopefully, by the end of next week, I will have both the Watson project and the new transcription completed. It is now getting close to the last month of the semester, so we shall see how much I get done before then.
Week 12: Citations and Back to Trancriptions
11/7/25
It is now the end of my twelfth week working for PRINT. As far as I am concerned, the rough draft for the Samuel Watson mini-bio is completed, and this week, most work I did on it was adding citations in footnotes throughout the essay, though I was also able to find one more primary source concerning a member of Watson's family. Still, I have not been successful in finding a death record for Samuel Watson himself, so I've had to rely on secondary sources for that aspect of the bio.
Besides my work on Samuel Watson, I have gone back to mostly doing transcriptions, and I managed to get two done this week, with a third currently in progress, which I should have done early next week, unless I end up beginning a final draft for the Watson project, depending on when I receive feedback on it from my supervisor Kayla, and how much I have to revise. Somewhat amusingly, one of the letters I was reading and transcribing was being written by a man who was recounting some of the times he was physically assaulted for speaking publicly about his beliefs. Knowing that the Society of Friends tends to make inflammatory statements when ministering, I can only imagine what he said before his attack.
Last week, because I was worried about how much time I would have to do some assignments for my other classes this semester due to Halloween-related activities, I ended up choosing not to attend the weekly Dutch Transcription Workshop over Zoom. This week was not the case, so I was able to attend.
Overall, I feel that I have very little to say about my work for PRINT this week. One notable thing that happened this week was that I finished planning and enrolling for my classes in the next semester, which will be the semester that I graduate. My advisor showed me that I still needed one extra credit hour before I can graduate, which I can get by doing one more internship. Because I needed an internship and I am quite enjoying my time working for PRINT, I asked Kayla if I'd be able to work for PRINT next semester, and judging by her reaction and Dr. Beiler's, it would seem that I have a good chance of interning for PRINT again, which I am very happy about. I have become personally invested in PRINT and learning about the lives of people who were a part of groups like the Quakers, as well as helping to contribute to the project, so I do not believe that I am ready to leave just yet.
Week 13: Closing In On The End
11/14/25
It is now the end of my thirteenth week working for PRINT. There are only a couple of weeks left in the entire semester, which means that I now have to consider wrapping up everything related to my internship. Not only do I have my final draft for the Samuel Watson Mini-Bio to complete, which I have already started by revising my rough draft, but I also have to consider the End of Semester History Internship Showcase, were I will have to present before an audience about my internship experience. I've only had to publicly present a few times throughout the entirety of the last three years that I have been at UCF, and naturally it is not something I am looking forward to, but I will have to do it regardless. Along with a PowerPoint, I will need to prepare a script for myself, or rather a list of bullet-points that I'll need to hit during my presentation. I discovered during the preparation for my speech for Dr. Beiler's class that it is considerably easier to memorize topics that I need to discuss, rather than trying to strictly stick to a script.
As per usual, I have been doing transcriptions for the majority of the week, and as expected, I am having less pre-existing transcriptions to work with, meaning I have more transcriptions to do from scratch. I cannot complain, though, as the increasing difficulty just makes it so I have to put the skills that I have been learning for the past twelve or so weeks to the test, and so far, I would say that I have been doing quite well. Of course, there have been plenty of times where the writing has been too challenging for me and I had to ask for help, which I have also gotten used to doing during the last twelve weeks. This week, I have completed two transcriptions, and I am over halfway done with a third.
Part of the challenge with the end of the Semester is the piling up of work from my other classes, which I have had to balance out with my work at PRINT, so I have not been doing as much PRINT work on weekends. Still, I think I have done a good job with keep up with both. However, because of assignments for my class "Colonial Florida History", I have been putting off working on my presentation for the end of the semester. Once I am done with those, I plan on starting my presentation then.
Week 14: Showcase Day
11/21/25
Today marks the end of my fourteenth week working for PRINT, as well as the day of the End of Semester History Internship showcase, for which I did a presentation over Zoom about my experience working for PRINT. During my presentation, I discussed subjects including the skills that I learned, the challenges I faced, and advice that I would give to future interns. Despite the presentation being done virtually, I was still very nervous going in, and I am not entirely sure if I had done that well during my timeslot. It did not help that I momentarily forgot how to start a Google Slides slideshow after sharing my screen. Still, public speaking is certainly something that I will have to get used to doing if I want to continue pursuing history academically, as well as professionally.
Yesterday was my Internship Evaluation meeting with my supervisor Kayla, as well as my last ever meeting with her for my internship as she was going to start a full-time position somewhere else at UCF. I personally hope she does well. Anyways, we discussed the revisions to be made for my Samuel Watson Mini-Bio, and once I get the last bit of feedback from her, I will be able to put the final draft together. Since Kayla won't be at PRINT anymore, I will be reporting directly to Dr. Beiler every week until the end of the Semester, and likely next semester too. I have been approved by Dr. Beiler and Dr. French, the latter being in charge of organizing history internships, to continue working for PRINT in the Spring, which I am very happy about. During my discussion with Dr. Beiler on Tuesday, I learned about the new assignments that I could be doing in 2026, which includes correcting online transcriptions of letters made on Zooniverse, as well as giving feedback on Mini-Bios being made by other people. The new year will bring with it a lot more responsibilities, as well as challenges, for me, but I am willing to tackle them.
Other than that, this week I have been transcribing letters as per usual, and I am now at twenty-seven completed, with a twenty-eighth in progress. I would like to get some work on it done this weekend, but the end of the semester means that the work for my other classes will be getting more intense, so I will have to manage my time carefully.
Spring 2026
Week 1: New Semester, New Responsibilities
1/15/26
Today is the end of my first week working for PRINT in 2026. I have to say that I am pretty happy to be back, even if I did spend half of the week sick from a cold that I picked up during break. Somehow, I did not realize that my last blog post was to be my LAST blog post for last semester's internship, so I left without a conclusion. I apologize to anyone reading this now. I am not entirely sure an introduction is required for the first week's blog, since this is the same internship as last time, but just to be safe: my name is Lukas Kaiser, I am a History major at UCF, and this is the second and last semester of my senior year. I hope to gain further experience with history as a profession during my time working for PRINT, and I would also like to hone the skills that I can use in the future, such as if I enter Graduate school. My research interests remain the same.
I am back to doing transcriptions, but I probably will not do as many as I did last semester (30), since I will have some new tasks to work on this semester. I will be working on Zooniverse this Semester where I will have to review and approve transcriptions by volunteers of English Quaker letters. I have already begun familiarizing myself with the website, though I will still need some time before I fully understand how it works. According to my workplan I will also be providing help to the new intern for PRINT with transcribing. Personally, I question if I am actually qualified to mentor someone in transcribing letters, as my progress with this new transcription shows I still have a way to go in that department. Hopefully, it is not a "blind leading the blind" type of situation.
At some point during the semester, I am also expected to write a new mini-bio on a correspondent of the Barclay collection, which I expect to be pretty fun. Hopefully, I will have a little more luck with finding specific information I want compared with my experience with Samuel Watson. Then again, I had some useful information about Watson beforehand, thanks to my coworkers, so depending on whom I choose to write about, it may be more difficult. Only time will tell.
Week 2: Zooniverse and the Second Mini-Bio
1/23/26
Today marks the end of my second week of my second internship with PRINT. This was also the week that I first began using the ALICE tool for Zooniverse, as well as when I began my first steps to writing a new Mini-Bio for one of the correspondants of the letters in PRINT's database. My job on Zooniverse is to use the ALICE tool to review transcriptions of letters done by volunteers on Zooniverse, approving and editing transcribed lines as I go along. On Tuesday I was given a tutorial on using the ALICE tool by my coworker Casey, and I will most likely be bringing up any future questions I have on it to her.
As I quickly found out, reviewing transcriptions on Zooniverse also involves a lot of deleting of extra lines that are not supposed to be on the final product. Ideally, there would only be one solid line of text for each line on the letter, instead of multiple disconnected lines. I accidentally made the mistake of deleting a line that I was not supposed to delete, so I ended up having to redo the entire transcribed line froms scratch, without any reference to what had already been transcribed by the volunteers. Clearly, I will have to be more careful when deleting lines in the future. So far, I have managed to finish reviewing two longer pages, and a few smaller transcriptions, and next week I should be able to get more done.
As for the new Mini-Bio that I am doing, I have chosen to research a man named Robert Sandilands, whose name has come up in a letter that I transcribed last semester. After having spent much of Thursday trying to research Sandilands, a part of me is now regretting selecting the man, as though I have managed to find a brief mention of him in someone else's memoirs, as well as the letter and even a text that he wrote, I still next to nothing about Sandilands himself. His year of birth and death, where he lived, and the details of his family are still a mystery to me. Sadly, FindMyPast.com, which was crucial for my Mini-Bio on Samuel Watson, has not proven to be anywhere near as helpful this time around. Hopefully, I will be able to find more information about Sandilands during the upcoming weeks, but at the moment, it appears that I will have more success working with Zooniverse, as well as continuing with transcribing letters from the Barclay collection.
1/30/26
It is now the end of my third week interning for PRINT in 2026. My work on Zooniverse is going well, despite a few minor difficulties. There are times when I feel myself being confused by how Zooniverse transcriptions work, and it does not help that there are occasional gaps in the work of previous transcribers. Like me, there are also some parts of lines that have to remain blank or in confusion, which is not necessarily the fault of the transcribers, as words can either be written in ways that they are hard to read, or the page itself could be damaged.
As for my work concerning my Mini-Bio on Robert Sandilands, progress has continued to be very slow. I now have access to four of his writings, but these were mainly religious texts, in which he said very little about his personal life. I did manage to learn from these that he was from the city of Aberdeen in Scotland, and that his father had served as some sort of official in the city. It would have helped if he had said what his father's name actually was, so that I could use that to learn of Sandilands's birth date, but I was not so lucky. One of my other sources on the life of Robert Sandilands is the memoir of Alexander Jaffry, the provost of the city of Aberdeen. While he does not write much on Sandilands, as his name only comes up twice in the entire text, it does show that there were times where Sandilands was locked up in prison alongside other members of the Society of Friends. which was a common occurance at the time. I also have a letter written by Robert from the Barclay collection, which points to him being in Windsor at some point. Other than that, I have almost nothing to work with, at least for now. FindMyPast.com, outside of pointing me to the memoir, is clearly not going to be very helpful to my work, despite its part in the research on Samuel Watson last semester. Ancestry.com, on the other hand, might be slightly more useful, though my inquiries to a Robert Sandilands in Aberdeen has not been fruitful quite yet. If Ancestry fails me, I will have little else to turn to. Honestly, I much prefer doing work on Zooniverse, as well as the transcriptions of letters, as there is considerably more certainty when it comes to them. Hopefully, my research gives me something to work with in the coming week.
Week 4: A Familiar Mistake
2/6/26
Today marks the end of my fourth week working for PRINT in 2026, and a couple of noteworthy things happened. First of all, on Tuesday, I gave the new intern Kate a brief rundown on doing research for her own Mini-Bio that she is doing, which involved me showing her the two different genealogical websites that I made use of during my previous projects, as well as the format that I used for the biographies. Hopefully, my advice will prove useful.
Anyways, the familiar mistake that I am referencing is how last semester, I wasted a lot of time on my Samuel Watson Mini-Bio by not first consulting previous research done by other members of PRINT. At that time, it resulted in me accidentally researching a completely different Samuel Watson for a couple of days. This time, my mistake was not adequately searching a file called "Persons and Places Directory", which contains a lot of information being researched by PRINT. Upon my first glance, I thought Robert Sandilands was not in it, but then, when I checked it again and looked at other pages of the document, I found that not only was he in there, but there was a plethora of information that I was missing out on, including vital information like the date of his birth, his marraige, his death, as well as the names of his parents. There was even information on FindMyPast.com that I had not discovered when I was using it. I now have access to multiple primary sources that I can look through, as well as the information that I have used previously, which I can use to make more accurate searches for further information on Sandilands. Hopefully, with what I have now, I will be able to put together a cohesive biography on him in just a few weeks. I am a little disappointed in myself for making a very similar mistake to last semester when it came to researching for my Mini Bio, although surely I have learned my lesson this time.
This week, I also completed my second letter transcription of the semester, though it will probably be my last for a while, if not even for the entire semester. After all, my priority for this semester is supposed to be working on the transcriptions on Zooniverse, as well as my Mini Bio, so I do not see myself doing many letter transcriptions in the near future. After all, it did take quite a while to complete the new one, as I was focused on my other work. We shall see if that changes.
Week 5: Continuous Progress
2/13/26
Today marks the end of my fifth week working for PRINT in the spring of 2026, and I do not believe I have much to report regarding the work I am doing on the project. On Zooniverse, I have completed reviewing several pages, inspecting a total of nine full letters, editing as needed, and then approving them. As usual, I have occasionally had issues with lines not being fully transcribed by PRINT's volunteers on Zooniverse, but I have managed to get past the majority of these issues.
As for my Mini-Bio on Robert Sandilands, my research on him is mostly complete, as I have acquired numerous sources that I believe will be sufficient to construct a consistent narrative on his life. I even managed to find a solid record of his death in 1727, which I had been missing, up until just before beginning the writing of this very post. I will say that it is quite unexpected that I was not able to find any evidence of Sandilands having children, even when using previous information on him from other PRINT researchers, as the other two Quakers that I researched had at least a few. At this point, I can only conclude that he had no children during his entire life. Other than that, I have plenty of sources about his affiliation with the Quakers, as well as the several instances that he was arrested and imprisoned for said affiliation. With the information I have, I began to construct a timeline of events in Robert Sandilands's life, which will be the framework that I will use to write the Mini-Bio.
Outside of my work for PRINT, my life has become somewhat busier when compared to last semester. My Sundays are completely booked up the majority of the time, as I have taken up a sport that more or less requires me to attend practices around forty minutes from where I live, and I have also started a part-time job, so my Wednesdays are much busier as well. Because of this, it has become slightly harder to balance my school work and my work for PRINT, but that just goes to show that I really need to improve on shaking off my habit of procrastination. After all, if I am to have a career based in History in the future, better professional habits are something I will have to cultivate.
Week 6: Putting Research Onto Paper
2/20/26
Today marks the end of the sixth week of my internship working for PRINT in 2026. I decided to slightly scale back my Zooniverse work for the week, as next week the rough draft for my Mini-Bio on Robert Sandilands is due. As for the Mini-Bio, progress is going very well. As I have mentioned last week, my research on him is mostly completed, though I have gone back to Ancestry and FindMyPast a couple of times in order to try to find certain information I was lacking, such as when his wife Mary Cross was born and when she died, but to no avail. As I did for my Samuel Watson Mini-Bio, I created a timeline of events in Sandilands's life, which was to act as a framework for my first draft. At this time, the rough draft is mostly complete, which just a few more events needing to be added into the essay. I will also need to add more citations throughout the rough draft for the sources I used, which is by far the least fun aspect to writing a Mini-Bio, or any essay for my History major for that matter.
I am expecting that next week will be spent finishing up the rough draft, and I only plan to resume Zooniverse work once it is done, at least when I am working in the office. This week, much of my work on Zooniverse has been done remotely from home, while my time working in person is spent on the Sandilands Mini-Bio. Speaking of Zooniverse, I did learn a little bit more about the ALICE tool, which I have been using to review, edit, and approve transcriptions. Mainly, I learned that the tool is very bad and annoying to use. Apparently, deleting extra lines of text messes with the ordering of transcribed lines made by the volunteers, so I will have to make sure that I only delete extra lines after I am finished reviewing a letter.
Anywas, I don't have much else to say about this week, as my work has remained fairly consistent, and I have been becoming more comfortable with my tighter schedule. I am curious about what will come next after my Mini-Bio is completed, but until then, things will remain mostly the same. Perhaps I will have something more interesting to write about next week, but I personally doubt it.
Week 7: Tediousness, With A Capital 'T'
2/26/26
Today marks the end of my seventh week working for PRINT in 2026, as well as my 22nd birthday (technically, the PRINT timesheet has our week end on Thursdays, not Fridays). My big accomplishment this week was finishing and turning in my rough draft of my Mini-Bio on Robert Sandilands, which did not take long. The greatest difficulty was mainly creating the last few citations for my research, and that was mostly just tedious.
Speaking of 'tedious", that is the only way that I can describe some of my recent work on Zooniverse, namely two specific letters. I am not sure if I can adequately describe my frustration to an audience that does not know how Zooniverse and the ALICE tool work using only words, which is why I have included pictures.
This here is what the ideal letter looks like. For every line of written text, there is a single line of transcribed text, and when clicked on, it also shows me the different versions of the transcribed line made by other users of Zooniverse. I can finish reviewing and approving a letter like this one very easily.
This is the letter I am currently working on. As you can clearly see, it is an absolute mess of many extra lines, which either encompass the entirety of the written line or just one or two words. This is not only incredibly difficult to review, as I have to search for the specific lines that can be approved, which are also very few in comparison, but the PRINT guidelines state that all extra lines must be deleted. The worst part of this is that there is no way to delete multiple lines at once, so instead I have to delete each extra line one at a time. This is by far the most annoying thing I have had to do for PRINT, even worse than trying to transcribe barely-legible letters from the 1600s. What makes this even more annoying is that this wouldn't even be a problem if the volunteer transcribers had adhered to the rules that are shown before they start transcribing letters, and can be easily referenced while working.
It took me over an hour total to finish deleting the extra lines alone for the first of these letters. I am not happy.
At the very least, my Mini-Bio on Sandilands was received well by the first person who read it, so that means my week has not been totally negative. After I am done reviewing, painstakingly editing, and then approving this second letter, I will pray that the next few letters I read are not like the one shown above. Based on this experience and the statements of some of my coworkers on their own work for PRINT, the life of a historian can be very tedious and annoying. Though I can also clearly see that it can be very rewarding, and I know that I will feel great once this letter is fully cleaned up. That is how I felt about the first letter, after all.
Week 8: Feedback and Revisions
3/5/26
Today marks the end of my eighth week working for PRINT in the Spring of 2026, as well as the first week of March. Recently, I was given feedback from my supervisor Dr. Beiler, on the rough draft for my Robert Sandilands Mini-Bio, and since then, I have been revising it based on the notes she wrote down. Other than correcting the formatting for a few of my citations, as well as changing how some sentences were phrased, I was working on trying to make the story of Sandilands's life flow more naturally, such as by adding transitions between different events that otherwise had no connection. I also added a short conclusion paragraph after the one covering Sandilands's death, which helps to make the story a little less abrupt, due to there being a twenty-year gap between the last notable event in Sandilands's life prior to his passing and the date of his burial. I also tried to do some research on JSTOR and the UCF Library for secondary sources that could provide some context for some aspects of Sandilands's life, such as the Society of Friends in Aberdeen, Scotland, though I was unsuccessful at this. I plan on trying again next week.
As for my work on Zooniverse with the ALICE tool, first of all, I managed to finish editing and approving the second of the two really difficult transcriptions that I mentioned last week. I ended up showing a screenshot of said transcription prior to any edits by me to my supervisor and teammates during our weekly meeting. As it turns out, this has been a recurring problem. It also turned out that I could skip out on letters like them. While I can't help but feel a little proud of myself for pulling through and finishing with those letters, I would be very happy if I never saw a transcription like those ever again. I much prefer reviewing the letters that I am currently working on, which are all far cleaner and do not have nearly as many extra lines that I have to delete before approving.
During this week, I also had my mid-term evaluation with Dr. Beiler, during which we discussed my progress with my current work and what I will be doing during the rest of the semester. Sadly, I completely forgot what she told me during that meeting about what I would be doing (If you're reading this, Dr. Beiler, I apologize), though I am still very interested in what is coming next, as I know it will involve me learning a new skill that I can use for my future career.
Week 9: The Last Week Before Spring Break
3/12/26
Today marks the end of my ninth week working for PRINT in the Spring semester of 2026. This week was, as per usual, not very eventful. The most I can say is that I believe that the final draft of my Mini Bio for Robert Sandilands is now complete. The last major addition I made to it was on Tuesday, which was the result of a suggestion by Dr. Beiler to look for a source on the proprietors/investors of the English New Jersey colony, whose ranks included Scottish Quakers. On JSTOR, I came across a source covering the proprietors of East Jersey and was pleasantly surprised to find that Sandilands was mentioned by name in it. I had already known from a previous source that Sandilands had used his wealth from his career as a merchant to promote the colonization of New Jersey, but this secondary source provided me with the opportunity to elaborate on it. Specifically, it mentioned how Sandilands had bought a share from another Scottish Quaker named Robert Burnett, who had himself suffered persecution for his faith like Sandilands. In a way, Sandilands was helping to establish a place in the New World for Quakers to worship and live without fear of persecution. Even though the addition to my mini-bio is only a few extra sentences, I think that they really help to provide context to not just the life of Sandilands, but that of the religious histories of New Jersey, and America as a whole. There is a chance that I will have more to add to my Mini-Bio, but as it stands, I am pretty satisfied with how it is looking now.
The rest of the week working for PRINT was spent reviewing Zooniverse transcriptions. Recently, the team has been looking at possible alternatives for the ALICE tool for dealing with transcriptions with a lot of duplicated lines, a problem that I mentioned in detail a couple of weeks ago. I will most likely try it out soon, either during Spring Break or after I come back from it. Speaking of which, it is also after Spring Break that I will be starting on my new assignment, so that is something to look forward to. I wish I could elaborate on it here, but once again, I have forgotten the details of what it actually is. Maybe I should start writing notes for what I want to write about in these blog posts throughout the week, instead of simply winging it on Thursday.
Week 11: The Week After Spring Break
3/26/26
Today marks the end of my eleventh week working for PRINT in the 2026 Spring Semester at UCF. This week, I began to work on my new assignment, which I have mentioned in previous blog entries. The task is to work with an Excel spreadsheet concerning "Mentions", which refers to names and places that are mentioned in the letters that the project's team members have been transcribing and archiving. I will be going through certain letters and keeping an eye out for the names of different people and places, and then recording them in the file. I also have to write down "keywords" that will help to show what the contents of the letters are being written about. I am also supposed to be working on the "Relationships" tab of the spreadsheet, but I have not started on that yet. Truthfully, I am not entirely sure if I am doing the assignment correctly, which I will have to get verified next week. When not working with Mentions, I have also been continuing my work on Zooniverse with the ALICE tool, which, despite being a little dull, has been going quite well.
One notable event that happened this week is that we were introduced to a new member of the project named Susan, who has been helping to code an online resource called the Query Tool, which will allow people to easily search for information in the PRINT database, whether that be a person, location, religion, or organization. It is still a work in progress, which is why we are also supposed to be trying out the Query Tool and giving feedback in a document shared with us. I have already tried out the Tool a little bit, though I am not entirely sure what constructive feedback I could give. I may work on that this weekend.
One last thing to note is that I sent the final draft of my Robert Sandilands Mini-Bio to Dr. Beiler this week, which I probably should have done before or during Spring Break, but that had slipped my mind. I have not received any feedback on it yet, though I expect that she will be happy with the result.
For the rest of the Semester, I will most likely be working on Zooniverse and Mentions, though I will also have to make a presentation for the end-of-semester showcase again. I am assuming that it will be easier this time around, since I know what to expect, though I am still not personally a big fan of public presentations. We will see how that turns out in a few weeks.
Week 12: Adding Info To A Website
4/2/26
Today marks the end of my twelfth week working for the PRINT project in the Spring of 2026.
During the weekly meeting on Tuesday, the team, myself included, were introduced to the recently-created PRINT Research Portal, in which users would be able to easily access information and documents pertaining to various people, places, and organizations related to the PRINT project's focus. It is still very barebones, and we were invited to try out the various admin features available to members of the project, primarily the function allowing us to add information to the website, and then we could give feedback to weed out any issues we came across.
Other than that, the only notable thing that happened this week was that I would be presenting in the End of Semester Showcase alongside my fellow intern Kate, in contrast to last year when I presented by myself. Honestly, I have no idea how I did not foresee this, since we are both interns working for the same project and working on virtually the same assignments. It will be an interesting change of pace, and I will have to make sure that I coordinate with her soon. After all, this is the last month of the Semester, and the Showcase, along with the due dates for the numerous projects I have for other classes are going to come sooner than I would like.
During the week, I have been busy with examining transcriptions on Zooniverse while using the ALICE tool to make edits when necessary, as well as filling out Mentions. I have been trying to focus more on Mentions this week, and I finished filling out information on eight letters, with a ninth currently in progress. It is not difficult work, merely time consuming. The time it takes to finish a letter mostly depends on the amount of names and places being mentioned in the letter. For example, the ninth letter had sixteen names written in it. Identifying keywords to go along with the letter also takes some time, as I have to actually read the letter's contents in order to figure out what is going on in it, and what keywords go along with them.
The difficulty in reading some of the letters I have been working with has been alleviated somewhat, as I have learned that if I downloaded a file containing a letter as a .jpg instead of a .pdf file, I am able to use the photo editor on the image of the letter, which has been somewhat helpful in making letters more legible.
Week 13: Outside Pressures, and an Unserious Question
4/9/26
Today marks the end of my thirteenth week working for the PRINT project in the Spring of 2026. The end of the semester is approaching fast, and with it comes the due dates for the many projects I am working on for other classes. Luckily, this has not impeded on my work for PRINT at all, as I am still getting a lot of work done.
Some of the letters I have been working on have a lengthy amount of places and people that are mentioned. One of the six letters that I read last Tuesday was concerning destinations that the Quakers were sending books written in Latin (that, assuming I am reading the letter correctly, were written by George Fox, founder of the Quaker movement) to at least 11 different cities around central Europe, as well as the royal courts of the kings of Poland and Denmark. The same letter mentioned a couple of other interesting subjects, such as a Quaker named Nicholas Rust that had been arrested in the city of Danzig (I assume Danzig, Poland) because of "papists", and another Quaker named Mathew Hutchinson, who had been shipwrecked while sailing north towards London along the coast of Suffolk, which he and everyone else on the ship had survived. Sometimes I manage to find interesting stories in these letters, though, based on what my other coworkers have said when speaking about the letters they are reading, it may be a sign I need to pay more attention to all the letters I review, as perhaps I should be coming across more interesting tidbits that I could mention here.
Otherwise, it has been a very typical week, working on Mentions and with the ALICE tool on Zooniverse. I have had the displeasure of dealing with a few letters that I had to mark as needing to be redone, ones that would appear similarly to the letter I posted here back in Week 7, and ones that have the opposite problem, as in they had entire sections that weren't touched at all by transcribers.
Last thing to note: next week, I plan on coordinating with my fellow PRINT intern Kate on how we will be presenting during the End of Semester Showcase, which should be an interesting shakeup to things. Also, I plan to ask at the next weekly meeting whether or not I should count "Jesus Christ" as someone whose name should go into the "people" category of Mentions. Its a less-than-serious question, though I truly wonder how my supervisors will react to it. His name does come up a lot in Quaker letters.
Pictured: the letter I mentioned, slightly modified to try and make it a little more legible