The Emma B. Andrews Diary Project: Tools and Techniques for Managing a Virtual Undergraduate DH Internship Program

The video recording of the presentation is available here: https://youtu.be/mtkFR5fVtkM The end of the 19th and early 20th centuries saw great archaeological activity in Egypt, a period that came to be known as the ‘Golden Age’ of Egyptology. Our digital project began in 2010 with the unpublished diaries of Mrs. Emma B. Andrews, who traveled the Nile for over two decades between 1889 and 1914, and whose work is an important yet underutilized resource for the history of this time. Her writing provides a detailed record of excavation often lacking in contemporary publications, while also giving an overview of the social, geographical and political history of Egypt at the time within the broader context of history of archaeology and Egyptology, gender studies and the social, cultural and political history of the Victorian era. The objective of our project work is to transcribe, encode and publish open digital editions of this primary source material for scholarly and public audiences. Since the beginning, undergraduate and graduate student interns have contributed to the project output. This past year has been challenging with the pivot to online learning, but we have successfully reinvented the internship as a fully virtual experience, and this Winter Quarter 2021 we have 15 students in the team. This digital demonstration will showcase our virtual project workflow, including our project’s Historical Markup Tool which automates the process of TEI encoding and named entity recognition in our primary source texts. The output forms the basis of digital editions of the diaries created in TEI Publisher, which the demo will also showcase.