Scholarly Workflow

Learning How: Apprenticeship in France, 1670-1830

Summer 2014
Supervisor: Ellysa Stern Cahoy

I wanted to dip my toes into research outside of French Studies before graduate school, and I was really lucky to have found the Mellon-granted Scholarly Workflow project based at the Penn State University Libraries. This exciting project examines faculty's personal research processes and work habits. After the ethnographic interviewing stage, the Scholarly Workflow group applied their findings to a collaboration with Zotero that will integrate personal information archiving into the research process. 

My role as a research assistant involved creating an exhaustive Mendeley library for my supervisor and redesigning the Scholarly Workflow website.

Spring 2014
Supervisor: Dr. Clare H. Crowston, University of Illinois

While studying abroad in Paris, I found a research opportunity among fellow Americans. This project examines the lives of apprentices in France from 1670-1830 in the wake of the French Revolution. After the monarchy was overthrown, apprenticeships in Paris were few and far between, but, as this project seeks to demonstrate, apprenticeship was still practiced in the French provinces. This prestigious project is funded by an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellowship (2012-2014) as well as a grant from the European Union to study citizenship.

I contributed to the project by combing through digital photos of notarial records in the provincial towns of Bourges, Dun, and St-Amand. This experience allowed me to gain familiarity with reading handwritten documents from the 18th and 19th centuries with a modern researcher's eye to pull apprenticeship data. 

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