NSMoHxCHDR Newspaper Digitization Project: Week Eleven (3/27/2026)

    Hello again! Welcome to Week Nine of my Spring 2026 internship with the New Smyrna Beach Newspaper Digitization Team at UCF's Center for Humanities and Digital Research. This week, we continued scanning the 1958-59 edition of The Pelican, and we are just a few issues away from completing it. Dylan and Jack both came in on Monday and were able to get over a hundred scans done, but as usual, I didn't come into the office until Tuesday after my class. As I was close to finalizing my organizational "To Do List" of things to fix with the uploaded scans before the end of the semester, I continued to work on that. By the end of the day, I had finalized the list, and I now have a master list of every file that needs renumbering, renaming, reuploaded image files, etc. Not only was I quite happy to have everything written down and organized, but I was surprised by how many issues I had already fixed and just forgotten to cross off. As of now, I'm hopeful that the rest will be finished by May. Other than that, I was able to reupload the files for the 03-11-2026 scanning session, as these were misnamed, slightly too dark, and had failed to upload properly, so several JPG files were missing. While I originally planned to fix these problems in Microsoft Teams, I decided it'd be quicker to just make the corrections within CaptureOne and reupload the session in its entirety to Teams.

    On Wednesday and Thursday, I arrived after 3 pm and unfortunately missed the Phi Alpha Theta "Lunch and Learn" event from 12:00 to 1:30 in CHDR. However, I still had the chance to chat with some other history majors who stayed late to talk with Dylan and Kaylie, which was nice. Besides gaining valuable experience working with historic documentary material, the internship is often just a great way to connect with other students and faculty in the UCF History Department. After catching up, Dylan and I started scanning for the day. Since it's not really a task for just two people, I continued working on the uploads in Teams until Dylan's 6 o'clock class with Dr. Scot French in CHDR. Dylan finished cropping, and I completed the export and uploaded everything to Teams before leaving for the night. Since the class uses the CHDR space, I listened in on some discussions about their upcoming projects for America's 250th anniversary. One student is focusing on types of America 250 "merch" made in China, which I found to be a particularly fascinating perspective on the event. On Thursday, I came in much later, around 6 pm, and ran into Daniel Rodriguez outside CHDR. He came in briefly, and Dylan, Kaylie, and I talked about our classes and world events. After everyone left, I continued Dylan's scanning session and nearly finished the book, but time constraints prevented me. Since I take the bus, I had to catch the last one before it stops running at 10 pm. Luckily, the upload finished around 9:30, and I managed to get on the last bus of the night. Finally, this week, Dr. Shier told Dylan and me that the larger book cradle will likely be completed before the semester ends, so we’re extra motivated to finish all the Pelicans and maybe start on a new set of newspapers!

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