NSMxCHDR Newspaper Digitization Project: Week Three (1/30/2026)

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 using the Titan scanner. Although there was some brief confusion at the beginning of the week with the reservation website used to reserve the scanner, this was quickly sorted out upon Dr. Shier’s return. 

Following my 10:30 Florida Politics class on Tuesday, I was able to come into the office and begin scanning. After first refamiliarizing myself with the machine and software it uses, it felt quite satisfying to pick up scanning right where I had left off at the end of the summer. At 3:00 pm, Thomas came in, and Dylan and I began showing him the process of scanning the bound copies of The Pelican, using the book cradle to hold open and position the book for best capture. After he got the hang of it, I was able to work on reorganizing some uploaded files, which had gotten out of order in the Microsoft Teams account. On Wednesday, Jack came in at 3:00, and Dylan and I got the opportunity to show him the basics of the process as well. Particularly fascinating to me was getting to re-examine the papers now that I’m taking several new courses on Florida this semester. For example, in my “Sunbelt Florida” course, we’re learning a lot about how developers, politicians, and newspapers all worked together to help “sell” the state of Florida to Northerners. When looking back at all the ads and slogans displayed in The Pelican, one really gets a sense of how intentional these newspapers were in advertising the state. An obvious example of this that I found just this past week was the phrase, “Life is Fun in the Florida Sun,” repeated alongside real estate ads spanning several issues. Following my 10:30 Florida Politics class on Tuesday, I was able to come into the office and begin scanning. After first refamiliarizing myself with the machine and software it uses, it felt quite satisfying to pick up scanning right where I had left off at the end of the summer. At 3:00 pm, Thomas came in, and Dylan and I began showing him the process of scanning the bound copies of The Pelican, using the book cradle to hold open and position the book for best capture. After he got the hang of it, I was able to work on reorganizing some uploaded files, which had gotten out of order in the Microsoft Teams account. On Wednesday, Jack came in at 3:00, and Dylan and I got the opportunity to show him the basics of the process as well. Particularly fascinating to me was getting to re-examine the papers now that I’m taking several new courses on Florida this semester. For example, in my “Sunbelt Florida” course, we’re learning a lot about how developers, politicians, and newspapers all worked together to help “sell” the state of Florida to Northerners. When looking back at all the ads and slogans displayed in The Pelican, one really gets a sense of how intentional these newspapers were in advertising the state. An obvious example of this that I found just this past week was the phrase, “Life is Fun in the Florida Sun,” repeated alongside real estate ads spanning several issues.