Nathan Gregg's Spring 2026 Internship Blog

    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 ...