Research Mentor Information
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Primary Research Mentor Name: Carl Kitchens
Research Mentor Preferred Pronouns: {Empty}
When potential research assistants are reaching out via email, what is your preferred honorific?: Dr. 
Contact Email (FSU Email if affiliated): ckitchens@fsu.edu
Position Title: Faculty
FSU College (if applicable): Social Sciences and Public Policy
FSU Department or Non-FSU Organization Affiliation: Economics
Headshot (optional): {Empty}

Additional Research Mentor(s)
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Research Assistant Supervisor (if different from above): Ben Emmich
Research Assistant Supervisor Preferred Pronouns: {Empty}
Research Assistant Supervisor Preferred Honorific?: Mr. 
Contact Email (FSU Email if affiliated): {Empty}
Name of Other Faculty/Collaborator(s) (if applicable): {Empty}
Other Faculty/Collaborator(s) Preferred Pronouns: {Empty}
Other Faculty/Collaborator(s) Preferred Honorific?: {Empty}
Contact Email (FSU Email if affiliated): {Empty}

Overall Project Details
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Title of the Project: Constructing a Historical Infrastructure Construction Price Index
Project Keywords: Optical character recognition, machine learning, microfilm, data encoding
Are you currently looking for research assistants?: No
Number of Research Assistants Needed : 4
Relevant Research Assistant Major(s):
Economics, Computer Science, Management Information Systems, Open to all majors

Project Location:: On FSU Main Campus
If the project location is off campus, does the research assistant(s) need to provide their own transportation?: No, the project is remote
Please select the choice that most accurately describes your expectations for the research assistant(s):: Partially Remote
Approximately how many hours a week would the research assistant(s) need to work?: 7
Roughly what time frame do you expect research assistant(s) to work?: Flexible schedule (Combination of business and outside of business. TBD between student and research mentor.)
Overall Research Project Description:
Relatively little is known about the price of constructing America's infrastructure during the first half of the 20th Century. This project will focus on digitizing historical records from the Engineering News Record to construct a new price index. to build the index, research assistants will help collect images from microfilm housed in Strozier Library, extract pages from pdf's housed on the Hathi Trust, and help adapt new OCR and machine learning technologies to extract and parse image files. 

Research Tasks:
This project will focus on digitizing historical records from the Engineering News Record to construct a new price index. to build the index, research assistants will help collect images from microfilm housed in Strozier Library, extract pages from pdf's housed on the Hathi Trust, and help adapt new OCR and machine learning technologies to extract and parse image files. This project will help students develop new skills, such as working with microfilm, coding in Python, and implementing recent advances in machine learning and optical character recognition software. 

Skills that research assistant(s) may need::
No experience is required to start, however, for tasks involving optical character recognition, parsing of text, and formatting images, some basic experience with compute programming is preferred. 

Mentoring Philosophy:
While mentoring, I meet with students regularly to discuss their long run goals and try to provide insight as to how to prepare them. This advice is especially aimed at students who may have an interest in graduate school. My goal is also to always provide the broader picture of where the student's task fits in, as the project may take several years to complete for the broader research team.  

Please provide a link to your publications, a video clip, or a website for your research project (if applicable):: https://sites.google.com/site/kitchct/research
Please add any additional information here (if applicable)::
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Roundtable times and Zoom links:
Tuesday, Sept. 5th 12:00 - 2:00pm : https://fsu.zoom.us/j/97236250280 
I am also available to schedule one on one meetings, please email if interested to schedule. 

UROP Program Elements
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Mentor Handbook, FAQs, and Communication: Yes
UROP Performance Evaluation: Yes
Materials Grant: Yes
UROP Poster Presentation: Yes

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Year: 2023
update url: https://cre.fsu.edu/urop-research-mentor-project-submission-portal?token=9L1idx5DhOMZTCGtIIhjMgGTnNyNXEUtfRTrSqJxi9E