Senior Ivy Kiernan Presents at Discovery Day
Senior English major Ivy Kiernan presented their research on crowdsourcing and open access at Discovery Day on September 13, which showcased undergraduate research at UTK. Kiernan’s presentation was related to their spring 2022 undergraduate research assistantship with Dr. Hilary Havens on the Maria Edgeworth Letters project (MELP), an open-access archive devoted to the correspondence of the Anglo-Irish Regency author Maria Edgeworth, her family, and her literary circle. Kiernan worked particularly on the project’s Zooniverse webpage, a crowdsourcing platform that allows volunteers to transcribe letters from Edgeworth’s correspondence. As part of their RA work, Kiernan created a Handwriting Guide for Zooniverse, which compiles all of the quirks in Edgeworth’s handwriting and creates a space for volunteers to ask questions about transcribing and interpreting the letters. Kiernan’s Discovery Day poster highlighted their work on MELP and emphasized the importance of open-access knowledge as a means of improving information access and relationships between members of the academic community and the greater public.