During the summer of 2024 I had the unique opportunity to take a couple months of my unemployment to engage in a bit of a passion project, which was working as a digital archive assistant, and helping to collect and catalog runaway slave ads from confederate newspapers. In my personal time I have an interest in the history of slavery, and how slavery was defended and how it overlapped with other contemporary factors. Reading through these old confederate newspapers gave me a deeper appreciation for how to handle and care for old documents, it gave me an opportunity to develop my own process for data collection techniques, like batch processing, optimizing data entry, and file sharing. Futher, upon completing the project I was able to make suggestions for potential future improvements.
Lastly, I participated in a podcast episode that you can find here, and I also make a small database of extra files I found in my searches here.