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...

     Hello again! Welcome to Week Eleven 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 re...

Hello! 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 past week we continued our work of scanning the 1958-1959 edition of The Pelican . However, because CHDR was holding all day events on both Thursday and Friday, myself and the other team members knew we would only have Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday to scan. Since I've been doing a lot more organizational work for the project, I was excited to do some scanning after my class on Tuesday. However, I had forgotten the Veterans Legacy Program was having their weekly noon meeting in CHDR, and so I decided to just work on uploading some missing scans instead. While I'm sure it would not have been a big deal for me to scan, I really want to make sure any missing files are uploaded as quickly as possible, as its easy for these things to get lost in the long list of project tasks ( I also didn't want to disturb ...

  Hello! Welcome to Week Eight 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 finished the scanning for the 1957-1958 edition of The Pelican , and on Thursday, Dylan began the scanning of the 1958-1959 edition. While I don't remember the exact years we have left to scan (several of the 1960s editions are missing), I believe we are more than three quarters of the way through so I'm excited to get them all finished. When I came in on later that day and checked the Microsoft Teams account I noticed the uploads had mistakenly been named as belonging to the 1957-58 edition. While this is a fairly minor issue, I've been increasingly worried about how future teams will be able to make use of our work, and if these image files ever needed to be moved some place else, they could easily end up in the wrong place. Furthermore, I don't know if I'll be able to continue worki...

 Hello! Welcome to Week Seven 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 our work scanning the 1957-1958 volume of The Pelican . While we have been making good progress in the project so far, I'm hoping we can increase the rate of scans per day to ensure we get about one volume scanned every two weeks. Getting about 100 scans per day would make that possible, but as of now, we're closer to a daily rate of 50-100. This is somewhat due to the fact that we share the CHDR workspace with other Humanities departments who use it for special events, and these are much more active during the spring semester (as opposed to the summer, when I first started working on this project). Other than that, I devoted a lot of my hours the past few weeks to working on renumbering and reuploading any misnumbered/missing files from previous scanning sessions, and this has meant I h...

    Hi! Welcome to Week Six of my internship blog as part of my Spring 2026 internship with UCF's CHDR and the New Smyrna Museum of History. The project is moving forward well and I think most of the team is finding their groove now. While I was originally coming in on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I've now switched over to a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday schedule and I think its been working well. With more team members scanning, it has freed me up to go back and work on fixing some of the mistakes made early on in the internship over Summer 2025, as well as any small mistakes made this semester. While I've enjoyed the ability to go back and fix our work, the majority of what I've been doing is organizing files split up across multiple folders, renumbering files that weren't numbered correctly, or deleting redundant files. Most of these are due to simple mistakes, but can be frustrating because if one page is misnumbered, it means all pages after that in the upload will b...

       Hello! Welcome back to my Spring 2026 internship blog, digitizing historic newspapers from New Smyrna Beach at UCF's Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR). In Week Five, we continued the task of digitizing the 1956-1957 copies of the Pelican newspaper, uploading them to Microsoft Teams and entering the relevant metadata for these scans. As well as these regular tasks, I spent a lot of time working on the administrative and data management aspects of the project. This is something I am increasingly spending my time on, as we have a much larger team of five interns working on the project this semester, rather than just the three of us who were part of the Summer 2025 team. In terms of administrative tasks, we had a partial team meeting on Wednesday with me, Dylan, Dr. Shier, and Caitlin. We discussed best practices when entering metadata and talked about potential ways to better store the digitized pages and their corresponding metadata. As Caitlin i...

     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 ab...

Hello again! And welcome to my blog post for Week Three of my Spring 2026 internship with the New Smyrna Newspaper Digitization Team at the UCF Center for Humanities and Digital Research. I am quite pleased to say that after some initial setbacks, this week, my fellow interns and I finally got the chance to complete the first scans of the semester!! Not only did we each get the opportunity to scan, but the new interns got their first experience with entering metadata into the project’s master spreadsheet, and Jack and Caitlin were both able to get their UCF ID cards added to the CHDR system so they can now come and go freely (Thomas was already in the system from another internship). In addition to this, our project supervisor, Dr. Shier, arrived back from his trip to Japan, and it was nice to talk and catch up with him. It seems he was somewhat unsure of what to expect upon his return, so I was pleased to be able to show him how Dylan and I had begun instructing the new interns in usi...

Hello! And welcome back to Week Two of my Spring 2026 Internship Blog with UCF’s CHDR and the New Smyrna Museum of History. As we’ve begun this semester, some new challenges and opportunities have arisen with the project. The most significant of these has been an issue with the large-format Titan scanner, which is used for all of our project’s newspaper digitization. More specifically, there was an issue with the CaptureOne software, which connects to the camera of the Titan scanner, and is needed to capture, edit, and temporarily store all digital images. For some unknown reason, the program would unexpectedly crash just a few seconds after it was launched, and my fellow interns and I could not find anything in the computer's files that would indicate why this was happening. Unfortunately, this meant we were not able to begin the process of scanning this week and had to focus on other tasks until this was solved. However, the Associate Director of CHDR, Brook Miller, was able to l...

Hello everyone! And welcome to Week One of my Spring 2026 Blog as part of my internship with the UCF Center for Humanities and Digital Research (CHDR) and the New Smyrna Museum of History. This internship is a continuation of the work I undertook over the Summer of 2025, in which two other interns and I began the digitization of historic newspapers from the New Smyrna Beach area, with the ultimate goal of creating a publicly accessible online newspaper database. To briefly reintroduce myself, my name is Nathan Gregg, and I am an undergraduate senior History major at the University of Central Florida with a minor in Florida Studies. As my minor suggests, I have a specific interest in Florida history, particularly in historic Florida newspapers and periodicals. While this blog will cover the same project as in my Summer 2025 internship, a separate series seems appropriate to cover my new role as a Co-Lead of the Spring 2026 internship team. Luckily for me and my fellow Co-Lead/returning ...