NSMxCHDR Newspaper Digitization Project: Week Four (2/6/2026)

    Hello again! And welcome to Week Four of my Spring 2026 internship with the Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR) at UCF. We are now a few weeks into the semester, and it’s been really nice settling back into a rhythm in terms of dividing my time between my regular courses and the internship. Since I’m taking an abnormal amount of online classes to satisfy my Florida Studies minor, I only have one in-person lecture on Tuesday which ends by 11:50 a.m., and afterwards I just go straight to CHDR for scanning. My class, Florida Politics, is held in Classroom Building One so it's a close walk to Trevor Colbourn Hall and the CHDR offices. As most of the other interns come in on Wednesday and Thursday, the office is pretty quiet apart from the occasional meeting and I’ve enjoyed the time listening to my favorite history podcast and just focusing on the process of scanning. It has also worked out well because Thomas comes in Monday-Thursday from 3-7 pm, and is able to then do some scanning while I work on metadata and can assist if he has any questions. Especially nice is the fact that we can then split up the cropping, which can get very tedious when you are having to crop hundreds of images. After our setbacks at the start of the semester, I was especially happy that we got 187 scans done total, and maybe even happier when our upload took less than half the time I expected. I’m not sure why it is, but this past summer an upload of that size would have taken over an hour but lately they’ve been much faster. In terms of the content of the papers, the 1956-1957 issue of The Pelican that we are currently scanning features a large number of campaign ads for a man named Arnold Lund who was apparently endorsed by Dwight D. Eisenhower, and who ran a repeating ad in the paper which proudly states, “IKE WANTS LUND.” As a Republican in the 1950s South, I’m sure he knew it would be extremely hard to get elected, and it was interesting to see how he tried to bypass Floridians local allegiance to Southern Democrats by attaching his name to such a popular post-war president. I’ve had trouble finding any information about him online but I’m fairly certain he did not win, as I think his opponent remained in office until the 1960s. Whatever the case, I’m looking forward to seeing what else I can find about the election in the next issues.

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