UCF Summer Internship Week #11

        Hello! Welcome back to my weekly summer internship blog as I continue my work with UCF’s CHDR and the New Smyrna Beach Museum of History (NSB MoH). As the summer semester ends, the other interns and I are still working on digitizing bound copies of NSB’s historic Pelican newspaper from the 1950s and 1960s. Although we often work at different times in the office, this past week, Dylan, Daniel, and I have all been there at the same time, and it’s been working well. With several of us in the office together, I’ve been able to focus on metadata entry while Dylan or Daniel process and upload new scans of the Pelican. Since Daniel usually comes in early in the morning, he’s been able to complete many scans before Dylan arrives to crop and upload them. Dividing the work this way lets us scan more pages each day without anyone staying in the office longer than needed. For me, focusing on metadata entry has been especially helpful this past week because I’ve been dealing with a bad sore throat and cough. With Daniel handling scanning and Dylan cropping and uploading, I can concentrate on catching up with metadata. This setup is especially convenient because I don’t have to worry about a slow upload speed keeping me in the office longer than I should be. Additionally, Daniel recently discovered a shortcut in Teams that allows us to see JPEG previews of each scan while entering metadata, without opening each file in a separate window and reloading the page. Although it seems like a small change, being able to view scans without reloading greatly speeds up the process and has allowed me to enter more data this past week than ever before. Another good update is that, with everyone in the office together, Daniel had extra time to look for the July 31, 1891, copy of The New Smyrna Breeze, and he finally found it! Dylan calls it Daniel’s “white whale,” since he’s been wanting to rescan it for over a month after realizing he hadn’t centered it properly, causing some text to be cut off. In the past, he couldn’t find it in the box of unbound papers from the NSB MoH, but now it’s been scanned and uploaded to the right folder. Besides working in person with the other interns last week, the CHDR offices also underwent some remodeling, with new chairs and tables brought in and the room rearranged.

UCF Summer Internship Week #10

Welcome back to Week #10 of my summer internship at UCF’s CHDR. This past week, I’ve continued to work on the scanning and digitization of historic newspapers from the New Smyrna Beach Museum of History. Specifically, I continued scanning the bound copies of The Pelican that fellow interns Dylan and Daniel started on while I was out of the office. As of now, we’ve completed the 1951-52, 1952-53, and 1953-54 volumes of the newspaper and are close to being finished with the 1954-55 volume. While in the past, the most challenging aspect of digitization was handling the fragile, unbound newspapers, when working with the large bound volumes, it's quite easy to scan a large number of pages in quick succession. As I’ve worked on my own with the book cradle, I’ve gotten a lot better at positioning the book so as to isolate each page for the scanner to capture. While some small adjustments are needed to ensure the captures come out flat and level, this makes the cropping much easier later on. This is especially important because as you scan more pages in a session, you end up significantly increasing the amount of time you must spend cropping. If you’re sloppy while scanning the pages, then not only do you run the risk of not capturing all the pages’ data, but you increase the amount of work needed on the backend when processing these images for upload. 

Uploading the images to Microsoft Teams is another area that can take a surprisingly long amount of time. Although the computer we use to upload scans has a high-speed Ethernet connection, which allows for upload speeds of more than 100 Mbps, the Microsoft Teams application/website itself can be fairly fickle. Just this past week, Dylan and I came in on the same day and completed a scanning session that produced around 63 GB worth of images. When we went to upload this collection, I was pleasantly surprised by the speed of the upload. All in all, the whole thing took around 20-30 minutes. The next day, I was in the office working on my own, and I had finished cropping earlier than expected, so I decided to complete a few more scans than I originally planned. Before I began the upload, I noticed the file was about 68 GB and figured it would take around 35-40 minutes at most to upload to Teams. Unfortunately, the upload ended up taking almost 1 hour and 20 minutes to complete. Although I checked the computer’s connection speed and found it was still capable of uploading over 100 Mbps, the Teams website showed a much slower speed. After looking around online, I believe it to be a problem with the website that occurs when a file is directly dragged and dropped into a folder rather than selected for upload through the website’s own upload interface.

UCF Summer Internship Week #9

     Hello! Welcome back to Week #9 of my summer internship with UCF’s CHDR and the NSB MOH. Due to last Friday being Independence Day, there was no blog posted for Week #8, but as of this week, I am officially back in-person at the CHDR offices in sunny (and very hot) Orlando, FL. Currently, I'm back continuing work on the large format scanner, digitizing historical newspapers from the New Smyrna Beach area. However, while I was away, Dylan and Daniel completed the scanning for all unbound newspapers and officially started on the bound copies! As of now, the only bound books we can scan are issues of The Pelican, a New Smyrna Beach paper from the 1950s and 1960s that primarily focuses on fishing news and local events. This is because the book must be placed into a book cradle to make the pages lie flat for scanning, and our current cradle can only fit The Pelican's smaller bound volumes. Since I was inexperienced with using the book cradle, I contacted Dylan and we coordinated to come in at the same time this past Monday so he could run me through the process. Although it's fairly straightforward, there are a few key differences with how you organize the scans that I was glad Dylan could show me in person. First, he walked me through setting up the session so that all scans would appear properly numbered and in the right order, before then completing one batch himself. He then had me go through and scan a few batches myself to get the hang of it. While nothing was confusing, there are certainly a few details that if not remembered will result in a lot of headache and backtracking, especially when scanning several hundred pages. The most exciting part is definitely how good the condition of the books are when compared to the unbound newspapers we started with. While it was certainly exciting to work with historical material from the 1800s, the ease of scanning these much more sturdy bound copies is a nice change of pace. While the number varies, each book seems to be about 600-650 pages long and takes us about 2-3 days to scan. At that rate, I’m hoping we can get all copies of The Pelican scanned before the end of the summer but I would say the biggest potential problem is the amount of data it takes to store these high resolution scans. While we have several one terabyte drives, a typical session can produce well over 100 gigabytes of data.

UCF Summer Internship Week #7

 Welcome back to Week #7 of my summer internship with UCF’s CHDR and the NSB MOH! This week, I’m continuing to work remotely while on a family trip on the West Coast, and as of right now, we’re in Tacoma, Washington, where we’re stopping to visit my eldest brother and his partner. This means that once again, I’ve been working on the sometimes monotonous task of reviewing uploaded scans and entering the relevant metadata. On the bright side, the papers I’ve been doing data entry on this past week have ended up containing some of the most interesting content I’ve gotten the chance to read so far in this project. Right now, I’m going through uploads of the New Smyrna Breeze newspaper from 1931 and 1932, and it’s been interesting getting to read primary source references to historical events that I’ve learned about in class. Unsurprisingly, evidence of the Great Depression can be found everywhere in these issues. While the majority of content is comprised of local stories or various medicine ads, I found a number of political cartoons that make specific reference to the effects of the Depression. One cartoon from March 27, 1931, paints a picture of two opposite kinds of “bonus beneficiaries.” The first panel is a grateful vet who thanks taxpayers for providing the money he needs to care for his family, while the second shows a wealthy man mockingly thanking taxpayers for buying him a new car. Since many WWI veterans were beginning to call for their bonus payments by 1931, this comic is likely in reference to their requests. As I find the creation of the“Bonus Army” an especially interesting aspect of Depression era history, it was cool to see evidence of the opposing viewpoints people held on the matter. Furthermore, it's fascinating to get a look into the lead-up to the “Bonus March” in 1932. It’s not subtle at all, but you can get an idea of how the economic struggles affected the national mood back then. Mixed in with the charged political cartoons are these upbeat advertisements for a promotional event where subscribers to The New Smyrna Breeze can earn prizes/cash by sending in nomination coupons or “First Subscription” coupons. While the mood in these ads paints a much happier picture of 1930s America than many of the political cartoons, it still represents the effects of the Depression, just in a different way. According to the giveaway rules, a person earns the most points by becoming a first-time subscriber; an obvious attempt to entice new business during a time when revenue is low. Furthermore, there is an obvious push to communicate that anyone who enters is likely to earn even a small cash prize, further incentivizing purchases at a time when people are looking for any available revenue.

UCF Summer Internship Week #6

Welcome back to Week #6 of my summer internship with UCF’s CHDR and the NSB MOH. This past week, I’ve traveled to Orcas Island in northern Washington state for a family reunion with my mother’s side. As such, I’ve dedicated my time this past week exclusively to metadata entry for the project. This involves reviewing the project’s uploaded scans in Microsoft Teams™ and entering the newspaper’s name, location of publication, binding type, date of publication, volume/issue number, page number, and whether each paper uses color or black and white ink. The final task is to examine the corresponding JPEG previews uploaded along with all the TIFF images to assess each page’s physical condition. This is initially described in a column labeled “Damage,” using a scale ranging from “Very Minor” to “Major.” It is then elaborated upon in a “Comments” column. The most common types of damage noted in these comments include tears in the paper, missing portions/holes, creasing, ink fading, or staining. Since many pages may exhibit multiple types of damage, I focus my comments on the tears, holes, etc. that obstruct textual data. For instance, a page might have a large horizontal tear on its mid-left side that obscures text, along with several missing pieces in the page’s blank margins. In my comment on that page, I would mention the tear, as it is the only form of damage that actually affects the textual data.

Of those pages I examined this past week, there were a large number of papers with horizontal tearing on the middle fold of the page. Around 20 of these pages from several 1909 issues of the New Smyrna Breeze were even completely torn through the center, and the paper had started to fray at the center split. For some pages, this would obscure several lines of writing, while others could be better lined up to preserve the legibility of the textual data. Depending on the amount of text lost, I listed the damage as being at a “Moderate” or “Minor” level. Other than these split pages, there was a collection of papers from 1891 that seemed to have been damaged by a cockroach, likely a “palmetto bug.” This is due to the unusually dark staining and small holes found on the page. Since many of these papers have been stored in Florida for decades, if not more than a century, I’m surprised that the other interns and I have not discovered more signs of insect damage to the paper material. No matter what type of damage is present, if it obscures any textual data, it's important to record this metadata for those using these scans in the future.

UCF Summer Internship Week #5

            Hello again! And welcome back to Week #5 of my summer internship with UCF’s CHDR and the NSB MOH. This week, we continued our work digitizing the unbound New Smyrna Breeze newspapers from the early 20th century. At this point, we are close to completing scanning for all unbound copies of the Breeze, and we have only a few copies from the early 1930s left. On Tuesday, Daniel came in the morning and got a start working on the papers on his own before I showed up later that day around noon. This worked well as I was able to take over when he had to head out in the mid-afternoon, and by the time I finished up, we had around 180 scans completed in the session(our single-day record). I was quite excited about this team improvement until I began the process of exporting these images to our project hard drive as TIFFs and saw an estimated wait time of more than two hours. This meant that I not only had to wait the two hours for the TIFF files to export, but the JPG copies after that, and then both versions would need to be uploaded to Microsoft Teams for metadata entry. While the estimated time soon settled at around an hour and a half, I felt like this was a bit longer than I would expect, even for such a large number of high-resolution TIFF files. This led me to look closer at the computer's drive, and I found several redundant folders where scanned images had been uploaded to our external drive as well as the computer’s. I deleted the folders after making absolutely sure that nothing essential would be lost, and since then, the export process has seemed to be back to normal speeds. While large sessions can still take well over an hour to complete the export and upload process, I now at least have a much better understanding of when I should aim to finish a scanning session.

While having more hands-on help in the CHDR offices has certainly sped up the scanning process, it's also contributed to some organizational issues. As we have three different people removing and returning newspapers from one box, it's gotten fairly disordered. One day this week, after we had a particularly hard time locating a paper we wanted rescanned, Daniel suggested an organizational day that could be spent on reorganizing the box of unbound newspapers before we return them to the New Smyrna Beach Museum of History. Daniel asked about somewhere we could write down any secondary tasks, and Dr. Shier found a sticky note easel to make the list on. I thought this was a good way to keep track of anything we’re worried we may forget, and a good example of the organizational and project management skills needed when working on a team project.

UCF Summer Internship Week #4

    Hello again, everyone! Welcome to Week #4 of my Summer Internship with both CHDR and the NSB MOH. This past week marked the first time that all three team interns were in the CHDR offices simultaneously, scanning materials and entering metadata into the project master spreadsheet. For Dylan and me, it was our first chance to gain experience with the data entry aspect of the project. For the third intern, Daniel, this was his first hands-on experience using the scanner, as he had been working remotely on the metadata so far this summer. This collaboration worked out well because Daniel could provide guidance on how to enter the data, and in turn, we could answer any questions he had about operating the scanner. We continued scanning the unbound newspapers this week and are close to completing the box. At this point, we have officially finished all the newspapers from the 19th century and have begun digitizing those from the early 20th century, but unfortunately, there are some significant gaps in the record. By the time we finish this first collection of papers, we will have scanned all existing copies of the New Smyrna Breeze newspaper from before 1933. 

Although this week marked my first time doing data entry work for this particular project, I have prior experience from a past project at UCF. This earlier project focused on documenting Black businesses in Orlando's historic Parramore neighborhood. As part of an assignment for my American Capitalism and Democracy course, we worked on a portion of the project spreadsheet, color-coding the types of businesses. Because of this previous experience, I felt much more at ease this week entering metadata. With all three interns in the office, we were able to organize the team more efficiently and identify a list of current tasks we need to complete in the near future (i.e., organizing the already scanned material for transport back to the NSB MOH, reuploading missing JPEGs to the proper Microsoft Teams folders, etc.). Dr. Shier provided us with a large notepad easel to write this to-do list on, which has been extremely helpful in reminding us of additional tasks outside of scanning and data entry. While we progress further into the early 20th century, most papers have improved in condition, yet we still encounter rare examples of extremely worn paper that we must handle very carefully. Unfortunately, on Thursday, Dylan and I discovered several papers that had split in half, and it took a considerable amount of time to piece them together and scan.