Week 4: Finalizing Transcript and Beyond

     Hello, my name is Hiram Davila. I am in my second year at UCF in the History Master's program, and I am extremely excited to share some information about my internship this semester. My current research interests regard the early modern Spanish Empire, particularly the Spanish Inquisition. This blog will be acting as my journal week-by-week as I intern with the city of Orlando and Greenwood Cemetery throughout the Fall 2024 semester.

    This week, not much has changed in my assignment that I can report on. I am still running into the same difficulties that I talked about in my blog post last week and in my blog post from my time with RICHES back in 2023. To briefly add, however, the AI that has been assisting me through SharePoint has been getting progressively better as the interview has gone on. This has been the longest oral history I have transcribed, so the AI's assistance is much appreciated. What I have noticed is that when the interviewee speaks with less microphone interference or speaks directly into the microphone, the AI works better. When the speaker also is a bit more articulate, like trying their best to not say "um" and "ah", the AI is better than the 65% accuracy I gave it last week. 

    A more exciting topic I would like to talk about is a potential meeting I may be a part of for the service learning undergraduate course. I will be working with my supervisor, Sarah Boye, as well as some people at UCF's Veteran's History Project (VHP) to come up with a small presentation to get students prepared to assist with that project. Some of the goals of the presentation include introducing students to their folders within the project's main drive, an overview of how to create transcripts, A/V logs, and abstracts, and showing training videos to them with a Q&A at the end.

    I think what interests me about this side presentation is that it may be one of my first times speaking to undergraduate students about skills that I have learned solely by partaking in internships. I never took the service learning course and had only seen official transcripts and metadata when I started my internship at RICHES. I believe that UCF has so many opportunities for history students to experience real-life historical work through internships, and the service learning course allows the students to explore these options. My hope is that even if the students work with VHP and they do not think that type of work is for them, they will still know and explore the other opportunities UCF can provide through the variety of internships available.