Nathan Gregg's Spring 2026 Internship Blog

 Hello! Welcome to Week Fourteen 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 began scanning the 1960-1961 edition of The Pelican. While I had thought the last two volumes after the 1959-60 edition were from the 1970s, it's actually just the final volume, which skips all the way to 1972. Unfortunately, this means there will likely not be any discussion of the Cross Florida Barge Canal, as President Nixon cancelled the canal by executive order in 1971. Nonetheless, I was happy with the progress we made with the '60-'61 edition this week, and I remain hopeful we'll finish the remaining volumes by the end of the semester. I also realized that I forgot to give some updates in terms of newspaper content from last week. Probably the most exciting thing was that I saw a picture of a Black person in The Pelican for the first time (and it only took about 6 months and more...

 Hello again! Welcome to Week Thirteen of my Spring 2026 internship with the New Smyrna Beach Newspaper Digitization Team at UCF's Center for Humanities and Digital Research. As we approach the end of the semester, and are close to finishing up the the last few remaining issues of The Pelican , I've begun focusing all my time in the CHDR offices on scanning. While there are still some organizational things I'd like to fix in Microsoft Teams, most of this can be done from home. Although we made good progress this past week, we're still behind where I would like us to be heading into the final weeks, especially as people's schedules become more busy with final projects and exams. The good news though, is we finished up the scanning of the 1959-1960 edition and are ready to move onto the last two volumes, both from the 1970s. In terms of content for these last two volumes, I'm particularly interested to see if either mention anything about the cancelling of the Cro...

Hello again! Welcome to Week Twelve 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 began scanning the 1959-1960 edition of The Pelican and have made decent progress, although I would have liked to get more completed. I’m mainly feeling this way because Dr. Shier informed Dylan and me that the large-format book cradle, which is needed to scan the other, much larger, New Smyrna Beach newspapers, has nearly been finished by those working on it in the Engineering department. My understanding is that this means if our team is able to finish all available editions of The Pelican before the end of the semester, we could start on these larger volumes during our final week. I think this could allow the project to more smoothly transition to a future team, as naming conventions and standards for these new, larger volumes could be established before they step in and take over. I know D...