Undergraduates in the PPA: A Project Manager’s Guide to Mentorship

Data curation internships on digital humanities projects provide unique opportunities to mentor undergraduates in scholarly work in a hands-on, mutually beneficial way. Approaching these internships holistically as pedagogical experiences for the student, rather than solely as labor for the project, is essential for success.

In this essay, I narrate how I have scaffolded the twenty-five undergraduate internships we have offered at the Princeton Prosody Archive over the past six years. As the PPA Project Manager since 2018, I oversee the hiring, training, and work of these interns, and I aim to make the internships educational experiences that balance the project’s needs and priorities with the student’s strengths and interests. Each student needs a slightly different kind of orientation to the PPA depending on their disciplinary background; however, I have created a process and set of training materials that is adaptable to each round of internships and could be adapted for other digital humanities projects, as well.

Overview of the Internship Program

The PPA has hosted, on average, a total of five undergraduate interns each year since 2018. Typically, there are 2-3 interns at a time per semester. Some interns continue semester to semester, depending on funding, work needed, and student availability. Others work for one semester only, typically for 3-5 hours a week. Summer internships sometimes carry a higher workload of 5-10 hours per week. This essay focuses on the undergraduates who have worked with us on data curation, data analysis, and prosody research, but we have also offered social media internships that give students experience in Communications.

We widely circulate the job description, which seeks undergraduates “to work as part of a collaborative team on an innovative Digital Humanities project about historical poetics and prosody.” The internship is open to “currently enrolled students in any field and with any level of experience.” To give students a sense of the kind of work they could do, the job description typically lists several potential jobs, such as:

• Curating collections of digitized works in our database
• Finding the locations of newly available public domain works in HathiTrust and the Firestone library catalog
• Researching print bibliographies to bolster early modern holdings

Finally, the job description ends with logistics about timeline, availability, and pay, and we request a resume and short email detailing interest and relevant experience.

Because we cast a rather wide net, the PPA interns come from a variety of disciplines and departments. While the majority are English majors, we’ve also hosted several students from the social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering; more often than not, students have minors or certificates that counterbalance their major and make them well-suited to the kind of interdisciplinary work at the heart of the digital humanities, such as an English major with a Computer Science minor, or an Operations Research & Financial Engineering major with a Humanistic Studies certificate.

Although they are technically “research assistantships” according to Princeton’s employment schema, we consider and advertise these opportunities as “internships.” It is a subtle difference, but “assistantship” emphasizes the professor’s research, with the student’s work being a means to an end; “internship” centers the student experience and values their professional development journey as an end in itself. The outputs of these internships are often datasets and/or an editorial article showcasing the student’s research, methods, and contributions to the larger project.

Our undergraduate interns are always formally hired and fairly compensated for their labor on the project. This is an area for pedagogy, too: teaching undergraduates to value their own labor as such and to learn to use the bureaucratic systems (I-9s, pay schedules, hour entry) that enable them to get compensated.

While we do not have a formal Student Collaborator’s Bill of Rights, we strongly believe in and uphold all the principles outlined by scholars at the UCLA DH program. I am particularly committed to the principle that “Students should have a clear sense of how their work fits into the larger project.” Most recently, for example, our interns started working on an annotation project. When I introduced this task, we discussed the research question motivating the project, the concept of machine learning, and how annotation fits into the machine learning pipeline. We met in person to hear about their experiences and thoughts, and we incorporated their feedback into the annotation guidelines. In this way, our interns were core, valued members of our larger project team – not just Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers completing an isolated task.

Interviewing

Interviewing applicants is an essential step in the process, as we almost always have more qualified applicants than positions. For one, it gives students a chance to practice and hone their interviewing skills. For another, it ensures that we are hiring students who will be a good fit. In these 20-minute interviews, I typically ask the following set of questions:

1. Tell me a bit about yourself – your academic interests, your extracurriculars, your career goals.
2. Why are you interested in this internship? What do you hope to gain from it?
3. From the list of possible jobs in the job description, which most excites you and why?
4. How would you describe the way you work? (Do you prefer individual or collaborative work? Do you tend to focus on single tasks until they’re done, or juggle a few tasks at once? How and when do you like to receive guidance and feedback on your work?)
5. How do you imagine you will balance this job with your other responsibilities?
6. What questions do you have for me about the Princeton Prosody Archive, the kind of work you’d be doing, or anything else?

These questions generally give me a good sense as to whether the internship would be meaningful for the student; whether their skills, interests, and work habits align well with our needs; and whether the student is overcommitted and taking on too many responsibilities (a common issue at Princeton).

Typically, students are intrigued by and interested in learning more about digital humanities approaches and methods. Many are not familiar with digital humanities, or have only a vague sense of the term but are eager for the opportunity to combine their interests in computer science and coding with their interests in English or history or linguistics.

We select students based primarily on their enthusiasm, availability, and individual strengths, but a team with a well-balanced skill set is a definite plus. The ideal team has some domain expertise in English or the humanities, some technical skills, and/or some experience with data entry or curation.

Onboarding

After selecting the interns, I schedule a one-hour group orientation with them; ever since the pandemic, this orientation typically takes place on Zoom. This meeting is an opportunity for them to not only get oriented to the project, but to meet one another.

I circulate an agenda ahead of time to model best project management practices for a collaborative research project, where clear expectations and frequent communication are key. I also structure this meeting intentionally, making space at the beginning of the meeting for everyone to introduce themselves and speak about their interests and motivations. This allows us to establish our community of research collaborators who can learn from and lean on one another.

Then, I provide two brief topical introductions: an Introduction to Prosody / the Princeton Prosody Archive, and an Introduction to Humanities Data and Metadata. These are mini-lectures where I screen-share the “What Is Prosody?” page from the PPA as well as our administrative backend site where we manage our metadata. As an entry point into the subject, I also ask them about their experiences with prosody (“Did you learn to scan poetry in high school? What system of markings did you use? Did you learn there was a right and a wrong answer?”).

Next, I talk them through the list of possible tasks from the job description and ask them to write their name next to the tasks they are most interested in. This enables me to take their interest into consideration when assigning tasks and see opportunities for collaboration.

Then, we get into project management logistics, such as where they should keep their work, how they should log their hours, and how they should communicate with me and one another. I prompt them to download Slack, the instant-messaging platform where we primarily communicate. Slack is much more helpful than email for building community, making announcements, troubleshooting issues, because interns can respond to one another in threads and respond non-verbally with fun emojis. Everyone works in Google Drive (rather than, say, Excel) to facilitate collaboration, asynchronous check-ins on progress, and feedback. Within our top-level “PPA Undergrads” folder, I make individual subfolders for each intern titled their name, where they will keep all their work. The importance of these logistics shouldn’t be underestimated! The work doesn’t get done if they don’t know how to get the work done.

I wrap up with an “AMA” section where I encourage the interns to ask me questions before explaining their next steps, which is always reading the following materials:

• The Introduction to Meredith Martin’s The Rise and Fall of Meter (2012), 1-12.
• PPA site pages:
  • Home Page
  • What is Prosody?
  • How to Search
  • Collections
  • Select Editorials: I will often assign them one or more Editorial essays written by former PPA interns to inspire them as to the kinds of work and ranges of essays that are possible. They enjoy seeing what their past peers have accomplished.

In recent years, I have added a definitions page of book anatomy/parts of a book into this orientation reading, as it became clear that the students had not necessarily encountered key terms like “excerpt,” “front matter,” “appendices,” or “title page” before. And I have added “Big? Smart? Clean? Messy? Data in the Humanities,” by Christof Schöch (2013) as an introduction to data humanities. I compile these readings and place them in the interns’ shared “Orientation” folder for their reference.

Workflows

Once everyone is onboarded, I assign them their tasks along with a workflow document I prepare for them. These are personalized Google Docs with instructions (and annotated screenshots, when applicable). I will often also meet with the student 1:1 in a guided Zoom session where I demonstrate the process, and then they practice it themselves while I am there to answer any questions. Here is an example of a workflow document we used to reassign works belonging to the now-deleted Music collection to other collections. It includes a “Purpose” section that explains how their individual task relates to the goals of the larger project.

I stress the interpretive decision-making process of being a data curator. As Meredith Martin and Zoe LeBlanc write in their forthcoming Data Work in the Humanities, data work is “meaningful as opposed to menial.” Rather than approaching data work as “grunt work” for undergraduates to do, we empower undergraduates to view themselves as humanities data scholars who understand that there is no such thing as “objective” data.

I teach them to think about process as integral to research and data curation. The workflow I give them is a starting point, but I stress that they are the experts because they are the ones working with the data. I encourage them to see the workflow as adjustable and to bring me their ideas. For instance, we started off curating our “for use in schools” collection using a binary Y/N system, but it became clear that it would be beneficial to mark texts taught in universities, in addition to primary schools, so the interns suggested we add a “U” into our schema for “university textbook.” And so we did!

As another example, one of our interns, Selena Hostetler ’23, came up with her own process and set of curatorial criteria, which she illustrated in a flowchart, for identifying typographically unique texts. (You can read more about it in her essay, “A Typographically Unique Tour of the PPA.”)

By teaching undergraduates to understand their data curation and data entry work as the scholarly research it is, we mentor them in the digital methods that define our discipline in the twenty-first century, as well as the project management skills that are widely applicable to a range of futures and careers.

Rhythms

The ongoing rhythms of the work are looser and harder to describe. I am keenly aware that our interns are balancing classes, extracurricular activities, work-study, theses, job searches, and personal lives. Their work habits and rhythms are usually not the same as mine, and I try to give them substantial leeway to work independently and complete the work at their own pace. Sometimes this means working 0 hours during midterms week, 10 over fall break, and 3 on a regular week, for instance. I typically try to peek in on their work periodically (moreso at the beginning of a task), and I’ll ask them over Slack how it’s going and whether they have any questions. If they reach out, I try my best to respond promptly.

During the semester, I make sure they know that I am always available for Zoom or in-person check-ins, but these asynchronous Slack check-ins are often sufficient. If a student completes a task before the internship is over, I thank them for their work and ask them whether or not they want to help us out with another. Whenever possible, I try to offer them a choice between tasks, and I always schedule a meeting to introduce that task “face-to-face.” I prioritize the interns’ holistic development as students and people over the work itself, spending the first five minutes of any meeting asking them about their classes, their breaks, and what they’re most looking forward to this semester. These small interactions are essential to creating an atmosphere where they feel comfortable asking questions, valued as team members, and empowered to shape the direction of their work.

Outputs

The Editorial essays in which students write up their process and findings is another opportunity for scholarly mentorship. These essays run the gamut from experimental visualizations of our metadata, to a survey of 18th-century tables of contents, to mining Twitter for prosodic discourse, to explaining the process of clustering similar works in the PPA. Not all students decide to write an Editorial essay, though all of them write a paragraph reflecting on what they learned from the internship. Those who do write an Editorial, however, benefit from close one-on-one mentorship throughout the writing and editing process.

Together, we brainstorm their essay’s focus, structure, and angle, and then the intern writes a draft, on which I provide high-level editorial advice in addition to sentence-level edits. The intern incorporates my suggestions into a second draft, which we then usually share with the PI for her review. The intern addresses any additional comments from the PI on a third and final draft, which I then clean up and post on the PPA site. The interns are thrilled to have a link that they can include on their resume as a tangible outcome from the internship.

For others, the dataset itself is a publication. If published on Zenodo, their names are listed in the metadata as contributors. For others still, the outcome is code they have written on GitHub. Other data work completed in our backend interface is recorded in our log, but is less visible to outside users, such as the corrections to the publication date metadata we ingested from HathiTrust, the assigning of individual items to collections, or the assigning of a cluster ID to items. Users benefit from this datawork by experiencing more accurate and robust searches, but the labor completed on the backend to make these search enhancements possible is less obvious to front-end users. We credit this work on our website, and in the acknowledgements of related scholarly publications, such as Martin’s forthcoming Poetry’s Data: Digital Humanities and the History of Prosody.

And finally, all our interns learn and practice various skill sets that help them in their academic careers and professional futures, including technical skills like data curation, data management, and data entry best practices; project management best practices; conducting research in library catalogs and databases; and using specific technologies such as Excel/Google Sheets, HTRC Analytics, OpenRefine, and Colab notebooks; as well as essential workplace skills like attention to detail; time management; collaborating with others; verbal and written communication; reporting to a supervisor; and problem-solving. I have written many letters of recommendation or acted as a reference for former interns who have gone on to advanced study in graduate school or successful careers in fields like publishing.

Conclusion

The Princeton Prosody Archive is a living record of the many hands that have shaped it over the years. Our undergraduate data curators have been invaluable members of the project team, lending us their technical expertise, their fresh perspectives, and their willingness to experiment with the data. I outline my mentorship process in such detail in this essay in case a part of it is useful to you as you engineer your own management structures for your own project, and to make visible the pedagogy and scholarly mentorship that happens outside of the traditional college classroom. Making data curation tasks educational experiences takes time, work, and a thoughtful approach, but is all the more rewarding for both the student and the project in the end.

List of Undergraduate Interns

1. Armani Aguiar ’22 (2019)
2. Caroline Bailey ’20 (2018-2019)
3. *Taylor Charles ’26 (2023)
4. Eve Fleisig ’21 (2019-2020)
5. Christian Fryer-Davis ’19 (2018-2019)
6. Carlos Rafael Giron ’21 (2019)
7. Selena Hostetler ’23 (2021-2022)
8. Gavin Keasler ’22 (2021)
9. Margaret King ’22 (2020)
10. Teddy Leane ’24 (2022)
11. +Elizabeth Macksey ’21 (2020)
12. Andrew Matos ’23 (2021)
13. *Anthony Nathan ’26 (2023-2024)
14. Sydney Peng ’22 (2021)
15. *Daria Popova ’26 (2023)
16. Cecilia Quirk ’24 (2022-2023)
17. Olivia Roslansky ’26 (2022-2024)
18. +Sally Root ’22 (2020)
19. Paul Schorin ’19 (2018-2019)
20. Molly Taylor ’25 (2023-2024)
21. Sylvie Thode ’20 (2019-2020)
22. Claire Thornton ’19 (2019)
23. Andrew Tye ’21 (2020)
24. Vinicius Wagner ’21 (2019)
25. Kelsey Wang ’24 (2023)

+These students were hired by the Shakespeare and Company Project.

*These students were overseen primarily by Dr. Liora Selinger during the summer of 2023.

Thanks to Meredith Martin, Natalia Ermolaev, Jeri Wieringa, Rebecca Sutton Koeser, and John Schulz for reading earlier drafts of this essay.