Dear Reader, this is my first day of documentation for the Service-Learning Project and I'm already starting to understand more about how this should work. I was very confused last week when I started the project as I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I was mainly confused about the project's purpose and what it meant for me to do. I was confused about how I was supposed to help the community from behind my computer and I was picking my brain about how I would have to go out to complete this four-week-long assignment on top of my already busy schedule. But, once I took the time and reread the assignment instructions and watched the video provided by my professor, I understood how everything worked. I am more aware of the requirements and what is expected of me. While this assignment still has some work that needs to be done, it's not nearly as bad as I thought; it puts my mind at ease knowing this assignment is strictly online, and I now know how to access the website.

Upon accessing the website, I chose the Clara Barton: "Angel of the Battlefield" Campaign as it was the one I was most interested in. Once I selected it and registered for an account, it took me through some "Get Started" information and a "How-to-guide". This is the step that put me at ease as I was given clear instructions on how it needs to be done and whatnot. I haven't started reviewing transcriptions, but I just took a peek at it to get a better grasp on the task. Personally, I hope to learn more about Clara Barton and how strongly she impacted America. Educationally, I hope to become better at my transcribing and reading skills. But I'll save that for next week's documentation. Anyway, that's all for tonight, I'll see y'all next week!

Logged time

7:56- Started reading through assignment instructions

9:08- Finished documentation

XOXO Lyrik W.

Dear Reader, I'm Back! Today is the second week of this Service-Learning Project and I'm feeling slightly better about the project's outcome. I feel slightly more comfortable reviewing the transcriptions than anything else. The idea of someone sitting here, looking at these documents with all the ink bleeding and hard-to-read cursive, and being able to type it out is still baffling to me. So, I've decided not to do any of the transcribing as I don't think I'd be very good at it. It's much easier to look over someone else's transcription and compare it, side-by-side, to the actual documentation. That's what I did with my time today, besides this documentation.

One thing I learned from completing this task this week is that although I may not be helpful with actually transcribing the documents, I can still be useful and review and verify someone else's transcription. I think it's a neat idea that there is always a way to be useful in this process. In terms of American Literature, I learned a lot by looking through these documents. I became more familiar with the formatting of letters sent to others and also how formal one's speech was during this time. I've learned to respect the mannerisms used during this time. This also piques my interest in increasing my vocabulary to write in a more professional, formal manner. I think it will help me sound more intuitive, not just in school, but in the future when I have a career.

That's going to conclude this week's documentation, I'll see y'all one more time next week!

Logged time

3:07- Started reviewing transcriptions

4:55- Finished documentation

Dear Reader, this is the third week of this Service-Learning project and my last journal entry. I didn't do too much this week considering I spent most of my two hours last week. But I have some great news! Given this is the last week before this assignment closes, I decided to finally attempt a transcription! If you've been tagging along since the beginning, you would know that I was skeptical about the idea of transcribing the documents due to difficulty reading, the documents being written in hard-to-read cursive, and just overall grammar differences. However, I decided to give it a shot today. I started by picking a document that had cursive writing that was larger and easier to read. But, as I got started, I realized that the writing was written in Spanish! I'll admit, it took me entirely too long to realize it wasn't in English, I thought I was just extremely bad at reading the cursive. But what gave it away was the usage of accents in some of the words. Once I realized this, I noticed some words that were cognates but were spelled a bit differently. Although I didn't finish the transcription, I did enough to satisfy my curiosity on the matter and get a general idea of the process. Along with my transcription, I also submitted another review of someone else's work.

Reflection-

This assignment allowed me to get a better understanding of the idea of taking given information and/or previous knowledge of an author and applying it to their writing so that I can rewrite their writing from my understanding. Although this assignment was copying word for word what the original text says versus what we do in this class, which is rewriting the text from our understanding and putting it into modern language, this assignment still helped me to put together words based on context clues. This could help me with our assignments for Song of Myself by Walt Whitman. When given our assignments, we are also given a piece of text along with it that explains in a modern-day language all the metaphors that Whitman uses, along with a biography about Whitman. This assignment taught me that, in a way, these pieces of text we're meant to read before reading Whitman's poem, are a transcription but with a little more insight into Whitman's life. It has made me realize that I should use this text to better convey my understanding of his poem when completing future assignments.

Crowd-sourced refers to utilizing the services of a group of people, whether it's through a community or an online resource, to gather information or to get some insight about a specific topic. This Service-Learning project was an example of an online resource available to everyone where they can access transcriptions of documents in the Library of Congress's archives. Other examples of crowd-sourced materials would be Reddit, Chegg, and any forms of social media. All of these are used to ask each other questions to obtain a specific answer or information or search through previous threads to see if someone has already asked the question you were looking for. I like the idea of crowd-sourced material because it is something I utilize every day. I think it's a great resource to fall back on when the internet isn't giving you the information you need, and it can also be proven to be more helpful and factual if various people are giving you the same answer and explanation.

Whelp, despite the slight stress and confusion this assignment gave me at first, this documentation and writing to all y'all reading this helped me process and organize my thoughts so well. I really enjoyed writing to y'all, and hope y'all enjoyed reading!

XOXO Lyrik W.

Logged time

7:17 PM- Starting attempt at transcription

*Took about a 35-minute break in between*

9:12 PM- Finish documentation and reflection