NSMoHxCHDR Newspaper Digitization Project: Week Six (2/20/2026)

    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 be off. While this doesn't significantly affect us right now, I'm more worried about cleaning up these mistakes before future teams take over down the road. 

    While satisfying to fix, it can be get quite tedious, so on Wednesday I reserved the scanner for 4 hours and came in early to get a head start on scanning for the day. We are now working on scanning the 1957-58 bound volume of The Pelican, and its been pretty interesting. Since we first began scanning these bound volumes over the past summer, none have been so noticeably different as the 57-58 volume. Not only did the newspaper undergo a kind of modernizing rebrand, complete with a new title font and full page images on the front cover, but the images themselves are higher quality, taken with cameras with notably higher resolution. Previously, I've spoken about some of the Florida-focused courses I'm taking this semester for my minor, and in the course materials for them, extensive attention is given to the rapid transformation that occurred in Florida during the late 1950s and 1960s. While throughout previous volumes, the Pelican has obviously been attempting to "sell" readers on the beauty and safety of New Smyrna Beach, it's fascinating to see how the paper's changing methods reflect changes in Florida statewide. For instance, in Gary Mormino's acclaimed work Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams, he talks about how sex played a role in selling Florida to the rest of the country. This has certainly become more apparent in recent volumes, as The Pelican has begun routinely featuring images of bikini-clad pageant winners , beach-goers, etc. in the first few pages of their issues. While in the past, the focus seemed to be primarily on fishing, more often the message is about the vitality, fun, and excitement of the Sunshine State.