Nathan Gregg's Spring 2026 Internship Blog

 Hello again! Welcome to Week Thirteen of my Spring 2026 internship with the New Smyrna Beach Newspaper Digitization Team at UCF's Center for Humanities and Digital Research. As we approach the end of the semester, and are close to finishing up the the last few remaining issues of The Pelican , I've begun focusing all my time in the CHDR offices on scanning. While there are still some organizational things I'd like to fix in Microsoft Teams, most of this can be done from home. Although we made good progress this past week, we're still behind where I would like us to be heading into the final weeks, especially as people's schedules become more busy with final projects and exams. The good news though, is we finished up the scanning of the 1959-1960 edition and are ready to move onto the last two volumes, both from the 1970s. In terms of content for these last two volumes, I'm particularly interested to see if either mention anything about the cancelling of the Cro...

Hello again! Welcome to Week Twelve 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 began scanning the 1959-1960 edition of The Pelican and have made decent progress, although I would have liked to get more completed. I’m mainly feeling this way because Dr. Shier informed Dylan and me that the large-format book cradle, which is needed to scan the other, much larger, New Smyrna Beach newspapers, has nearly been finished by those working on it in the Engineering department. My understanding is that this means if our team is able to finish all available editions of The Pelican before the end of the semester, we could start on these larger volumes during our final week. I think this could allow the project to more smoothly transition to a future team, as naming conventions and standards for these new, larger volumes could be established before they step in and take over. I know D...

     Hello again! Welcome to Week Eleven 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 scanning the 1958-59 edition of The Pelican , and we are just a few issues away from completing it. Dylan and Jack both came in on Monday and were able to get over a hundred scans done, but as usual, I didn't come into the office until Tuesday after my class. As I was close to finalizing my organizational "To Do List" of things to fix with the uploaded scans before the end of the semester, I continued to work on that. By the end of the day, I had finalized the list, and I now have a master list of every file that needs renumbering, renaming, reuploaded image files, etc. Not only was I quite happy to have everything written down and organized, but I was surprised by how many issues I had already fixed and just forgotten to cross off. As of now, I'm hopeful that the re...

Hello! Welcome to Week Nine of my Spring 2026 internship with the New Smyrna Beach Newspaper Digitization Team at UCF's Center for Humanities and Digital Research. This past week we continued our work of scanning the 1958-1959 edition of The Pelican . However, because CHDR was holding all day events on both Thursday and Friday, myself and the other team members knew we would only have Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday to scan. Since I've been doing a lot more organizational work for the project, I was excited to do some scanning after my class on Tuesday. However, I had forgotten the Veterans Legacy Program was having their weekly noon meeting in CHDR, and so I decided to just work on uploading some missing scans instead. While I'm sure it would not have been a big deal for me to scan, I really want to make sure any missing files are uploaded as quickly as possible, as its easy for these things to get lost in the long list of project tasks ( I also didn't want to disturb ...

  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...