NSMoHxCHDR Newspaper Digitization Project: Week Thirteen (4/10/2026)

 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 Cross Florida Barge Canal in 1971, as I'm currently working on a final research paper for my Sunbelt Florida history course about the canal and efforts by Florida conservation Marjorie Harris Carr to stop it. From what I understand, Carr's usage of various Florida newspapers to spread her environmental concerns about the canal, played a major role in turning popular opinion against its completion, so I'm interested to see if this comes up in any issues of The Pelican from that time period. 

In terms of my schedule this past week, I came in on Monday and got about 100 pages scanned before I had to leave. Thomas, who was staying later, then took over after me and got another 50 or so scans before uploading for the day. However, when I came in after my class on Tuesday, I realized I had forgotten to tell Thomas I hadn't gotten to crop the pages I scanned the day before, and so he uploaded them as is. Unfortunately, this meant I had to go back and crop the pages before reuploading them. In the end, it was actually a good thing because I had accidentally scanned the same page twice without realizing, and this meant every page after this was misnumbered and out of order. While I was happy to have caught my mistake, I was pretty mad at myself because it meant I had to spend the rest of my time on Tuesday renumbering these scans in Teams. Despite this, I still had both Wednesday and Thursday to come in for scanning, and with the help of Thomas and Dylan, was able to get well over 100 scans done for both days. On Friday, Jack came in after another group finished scanning in the morning/early afternoon and I believe he was able to finish the rest of the 1959-1960 edition. 

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