NSMoHxCHDR Newspaper Digitization Project: Week Twelve (4/3/2026)

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 Dylan is planning on continuing work on the project though, so even if we're unable to start on them this semester, he can hopefully help to ensure a smooth transition for future teams.

As we're nearing the end of the semester, we obviously want to finish at least the remaining editions of The Pelican. As such, I came in a little earlier on Monday and decided to focus entirely on scanning for this week. We had just a few issues left of the 1958-1959 edition, so I first finished scanning and cropping those. At that point, Jack came in for the day, and so I handed things over to him to finish the rest of the cropping and upload. After he finished, Thomas began work on the 1959-1960 edition of The Pelican. As usual, I came in after my class on Tuesday and then on Wednesday as well. Since we've officially entered the 1960s, I've been on the lookout for any noticeable changes in the overall content or style of the paper, but so far, everything has been fairly consistent with the other recent volumes. While there are certainly more images and graphics used than in the volumes from the early 1950s, this is a change I noted in a previous blog post. However, I will say that this latest edition seems to feature A LOT more advertisements. I found this particularly interesting, as it somewhat reminded me of modern online newspapers with their endless pop-ups and side ads. I'd have to go back over previous years to confirm, but it seems like a much larger portion of the pages scanned this past week were 80-90% ads. I wonder if this is reflective of a larger, overall trend in the business model of mid-20th century newspapers to rely more on ad revenue, or simply a change specific to The Pelican.

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