Nathan Gregg's Spring 2026 Internship Blog

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...

Hello! And welcome back to Week Two of my Spring 2026 Internship Blog with UCF’s CHDR and the New Smyrna Museum of History. As we’ve begun this semester, some new challenges and opportunities have arisen with the project. The most significant of these has been an issue with the large-format Titan scanner, which is used for all of our project’s newspaper digitization. More specifically, there was an issue with the CaptureOne software, which connects to the camera of the Titan scanner, and is needed to capture, edit, and temporarily store all digital images. For some unknown reason, the program would unexpectedly crash just a few seconds after it was launched, and my fellow interns and I could not find anything in the computer's files that would indicate why this was happening. Unfortunately, this meant we were not able to begin the process of scanning this week and had to focus on other tasks until this was solved. However, the Associate Director of CHDR, Brook Miller, was able to l...

Hello everyone! And welcome to Week One of my Spring 2026 Blog as part of my internship with the UCF Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR) and the New Smyrna Museum of History. This internship is a continuation of the work I undertook over the Summer of 2025, in which two other interns and I began the digitization of historic newspapers from the New Smyrna Beach area, with the ultimate goal of creating a publicly accessible online newspaper database. To briefly reintroduce myself, my name is Nathan Gregg, and I am an undergraduate senior History major at the University of Central Florida with a minor in Florida Studies. As my minor suggests, I have a specific interest in Florida history, particularly in historic Florida newspapers and periodicals. While this blog will cover the same project as in my Summer 2025 internship, a separate series seems appropriate to cover my new role as a Co-Lead of the Spring 2026 internship team. Luckily for me and my fellow Co-Lead/returning ...