EMCO Internship Programme

EMCO are grateful to the previous interns Ben Wilkinson-Turnbull, Charlotte Emily Edgeshaw, Rachel Smith, Amber Vella, Katie Crowther, Amy Wilcockson, Sarah Van Eyndhoven, Abby Hammond, Constance Halstead, Katie Devlin, Hannah Wilson, Olivia Hurton, and Philip Trotter.

In September 2021 EMCO launched an internship programme for postgraduate students. Interns were identified by open advertising through the Association for Documentary Editing, with further publicity through our X and Bluesky account.

The required and preferred qualifications were as follows:

Graduate students (at least one year of studies completed) or recent masters-level graduates in history or English, archival studies or library science.
Experience working in digital collections
Familiarity with eighteenth-century handwriting and spelling conventions

Interns receive a contract that requires them to work for an average of twelve hours a week (or such number to be agreed), and are paid at an hourly rate just above the National Living Wage.

The principal assigned activity to date is the transcription and XML tagging of Elizabeth Montagu’s letters to Elizabeth Carter. This is one of the largest and most important sections of the correspondence, with around 700 letters lasting for most of Montagu’s adult life, with wide-ranging comments on external affairs and her personal and literary interests.

The interns receive training in diplomatic transcription and XML mark-up techniques. Their work is credited on the EMCO website in relation to the particular letters they have worked on.

An additional aspect of the internship programme in 2021 was the opportunity to work on the Montagu manuscripts in the Tyne and Wear archive, and to be trained in archival techniques in order to produce the first ever catalogue of the documents contained in this large collection. It is anticipated that further archival work may be available in the future.

The internship programme has run successfully five times since 2021, with four of the interns from the programme extending their contracts and subsequently continuing their work with the project.

Elizabeth Carter was one of Elizabeth Montagu’s closest friends and most important correspondents. Her biography can be found here.

Our inventory contains over 700 letters from Montagu to Carter. In September 2021 EMCO started an internship programme to begin the transcription of these letters from the manuscript facsimiles. The transcriptions are uploaded in batches as they are completed, and include biographical and location links but, unlike our other fully-edited Correspondent Sections, do not include footnotes.

All transcriptions are fully searchable by keyword through the Search function at the top of every page.

As at the beginning of 2025, a total of 480 letters had been transcribed and published.

Please note that all dates and location information are provisional, initially taken from the library and archive catalogues. As our section editors continue to work through the material we will update our database and the changes will be reflected across the edition.

Browser support: The website works best using the Chrome, Edge, and Firefox browsers on the PC, and only Chrome and Firefox on the Mac.