Getting in Rhythm

Raegan Benda, Supervisor: Jennifer Gonzalez

Sunday, September 14 3 pm - 7:30pm, Wednesday, September 17 3 pm - 7:30pm

The next few hours of my practicum experience at the Law Library of Congress meant I had to get in the rhythm of doing my assignments. More than just allotting extra time to completing Assignment 1, I had to learn to edit my work. After I became more familiar with the lingo of the internship and the assignment's tasks, I settled into a more consistent workflow for Assignment 1. Per the instructions given to me for Assignment 1, it should have taken me around 15 hours to complete. However, after using time to review the materials and made adjustments, I realized a few things. First, the assignment was going to take me longer than 15 hours to complete. Second, I needed to make time to review my work and made adjustments, as I got better and faster at transferring the metadata from document to spreadsheet.

Here is me using ChatGPT to turn the dates I needed into paste-able cells. It took some trial and error to get the program to do what I needed, but this sped up the process so much!

During this time as well, I turned to gold ole ChatGPT for some help. At first, I began transferring the metadata over from the pdf to the spreadsheet completely "by hand". I would type the dates, actions, congress number, bill number, etc. over manually. I learned quickly that I am so slow at doing this and I tried to find a faster way. The whole point of our work as interns on this project is to correct metadta that previous computer programs couldn't emulate the way it should be. So at first, I was nervous to try to use AI to help. I looked for a workaround and I found a solution that did require some additional editing on my part, but nothing I wasn't willing to do. I copied the data I needed into ChatGPT and asked it to create Google Sheets code I could paste in the exact format I needed to. There were minimal things I had to edit, however, this made the process so much faster. These few hours of my experience were spent challenging myself to get better, making mistakes, and ultimately getting into rythm as I chipped away at Assignment 1.