NSMxCHDR Newspaper Digitization Project: Week One (1/16/2026)

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 intern, Dylan Gilberg, we have three new talented team members to help continue the work and hopefully begin the process of making some of our completed scans publicly accessible and OCR-integrated. 

This past Wednesday, we had our first team meeting with Dr. Scot French at the CHDR workspace in Trevor Colbourn Hall. Dylan and I got the opportunity to not only speak a little about the project and our personal experiences over Summer 2025, but also provide the new team members with a brief introduction to the Titan scanner we use to digitize the papers. Although we are still in the initial stages, I am excited to get them comfortable with using the scanner, and I expect they will pick it up pretty quickly. With more team members, it's important for us to keep track of everyone's schedules as we figure out the best weekly routine for the project. A weekly team meeting was suggested, and I think it would be a good way to make sure everyone is in contact with each other at least once a week, but a specific time that works for everyone still needs to be nailed down. As I am in my last semester here at UCF, I am only taking courses required for my Florida Studies minor, and these are largely online. As such, I'll be able to be in the office assisting the new interns as they settle into their roles. I'm looking forward to not only getting to know the new team members, but to seeing what new and interesting stories we find in the papers as we undergo scanning them. Dr. French made the point to suggest we look for any interesting patterns or similarities across newspapers, as these could present avenues for future research, perhaps research that could be used in a master's thesis as I continue my postgraduate education. Thank you for reading, and I look forward to telling you more about my experience over the course of this coming semester.