Nathan Gregg's Spring 2026 Internship Blog

  Hello! Welcome to Week Eight of my Spring 2026 internship with the New Smyrna Beach Newspaper Digitization Team at UCF's Center for Humanities and Digital Research. This week we finished the scanning for the 1957-1958 edition of The Pelican , and on Thursday, Dylan began the scanning of the 1958-1959 edition. While I don't remember the exact years we have left to scan (several of the 1960s editions are missing), I believe we are more than three quarters of the way through so I'm excited to get them all finished. When I came in on later that day and checked the Microsoft Teams account I noticed the uploads had mistakenly been named as belonging to the 1957-58 edition. While this is a fairly minor issue, I've been increasingly worried about how future teams will be able to make use of our work, and if these image files ever needed to be moved some place else, they could easily end up in the wrong place. Furthermore, I don't know if I'll be able to continue worki...

 Hello! Welcome to Week Seven of my Spring 2026 internship with the New Smyrna Beach Newspaper Digitization Team at UCF's Center for Humanities and Digital Research. This week, we continued our work scanning the 1957-1958 volume of The Pelican . While we have been making good progress in the project so far, I'm hoping we can increase the rate of scans per day to ensure we get about one volume scanned every two weeks. Getting about 100 scans per day would make that possible, but as of now, we're closer to a daily rate of 50-100. This is somewhat due to the fact that we share the CHDR workspace with other Humanities departments who use it for special events, and these are much more active during the spring semester (as opposed to the summer, when I first started working on this project). Other than that, I devoted a lot of my hours the past few weeks to working on renumbering and reuploading any misnumbered/missing files from previous scanning sessions, and this has meant I h...

    Hi! Welcome to Week Six of my internship blog as part of my Spring 2026 internship with UCF's CHDR and the New Smyrna Museum of History. The project is moving forward well and I think most of the team is finding their groove now. While I was originally coming in on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I've now switched over to a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday schedule and I think its been working well. With more team members scanning, it has freed me up to go back and work on fixing some of the mistakes made early on in the internship over Summer 2025, as well as any small mistakes made this semester. While I've enjoyed the ability to go back and fix our work, the majority of what I've been doing is organizing files split up across multiple folders, renumbering files that weren't numbered correctly, or deleting redundant files. Most of these are due to simple mistakes, but can be frustrating because if one page is misnumbered, it means all pages after that in the upload will b...

       Hello! Welcome back to my Spring 2026 internship blog, digitizing historic newspapers from New Smyrna Beach at UCF's Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR). In Week Five, we continued the task of digitizing the 1956-1957 copies of the Pelican newspaper, uploading them to Microsoft Teams and entering the relevant metadata for these scans. As well as these regular tasks, I spent a lot of time working on the administrative and data management aspects of the project. This is something I am increasingly spending my time on, as we have a much larger team of five interns working on the project this semester, rather than just the three of us who were part of the Summer 2025 team. In terms of administrative tasks, we had a partial team meeting on Wednesday with me, Dylan, Dr. Shier, and Caitlin. We discussed best practices when entering metadata and talked about potential ways to better store the digitized pages and their corresponding metadata. As Caitlin i...

     Hello again! And welcome to Week Four of my Spring 2026 internship with the Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR) at UCF. We are now a few weeks into the semester, and it’s been really nice settling back into a rhythm in terms of dividing my time between my regular courses and the internship. Since I’m taking an abnormal amount of online classes to satisfy my Florida Studies minor, I only have one in-person lecture on Tuesday which ends by 11:50 a.m., and afterwards I just go straight to CHDR for scanning. My class, Florida Politics, is held in Classroom Building One so it's a close walk to Trevor Colbourn Hall and the CHDR offices. As most of the other interns come in on Wednesday and Thursday, the office is pretty quiet apart from the occasional meeting and I’ve enjoyed the time listening to my favorite history podcast and just focusing on the process of scanning. It has also worked out well because Thomas comes in Monday-Thursday from 3-7 pm, and is ab...

Hello again! And welcome to my blog post for Week Three of my Spring 2026 internship with the New Smyrna Newspaper Digitization Team at the UCF Center for Humanities and Digital Research. I am quite pleased to say that after some initial setbacks, this week, my fellow interns and I finally got the chance to complete the first scans of the semester!! Not only did we each get the opportunity to scan, but the new interns got their first experience with entering metadata into the project’s master spreadsheet, and Jack and Caitlin were both able to get their UCF ID cards added to the CHDR system so they can now come and go freely (Thomas was already in the system from another internship). In addition to this, our project supervisor, Dr. Shier, arrived back from his trip to Japan, and it was nice to talk and catch up with him. It seems he was somewhat unsure of what to expect upon his return, so I was pleased to be able to show him how Dylan and I had begun instructing the new interns in usi...