UCF Summer Internship Week #3

         Welcome to Week #3 of my Summer internship with UCF's Center for the Humanities and Digital Research in partnership with the New Smyrna Beach Museum of History. This week, we continued our work on digitizing the oldest collection of newspapers, primarily made up of unbound papers from the 19th century. Fortunately, as we've worked our way through the oldest papers, the condition of the documents has definitely improved. While there are still obvious signs of wear on the paper (stains, deep creases, tears, etc.), the pages at this stage are intact, and this has allowed Dylan and me to work a lot quicker this past week. Although this is not to say that this week was without its challenges. One challenge this week arose when we found several full spread newspapers that had to be totally unfolded to capture every page. These differed from the multi-page papers we had previously seen, which were folded along one line like a binding and meant to be read like pages of a book. This was a problem because not only were these full spread papers very easy to damage when flipping them while unfolded, but we weren’t sure if we should scan the whole spread or scan by page. Dr. Shier suggested we scan the whole spread and just label it as a spread in the file name as a way to preserve the different physical layout of the full spread papers. I thought this was interesting because my initial reaction was to devise a standard order to scan the individual pages of all full spread newspapers to keep the scans as standardized as possible. But Dr. Shier made a good point about the preservation of these documents and suggested that by scanning the full spread we would be preserving the different physical layouts that were used by the New Smyrna Breeze. This was interesting to me because throughout the early stages of this project I’ve been preoccupied with standardizing the scans to try and make them look orderly and professional when all collected together. However, Dr. Shier helped to remind me that not every scan can look the same. Some will simply have to look different because of how the papers are structured or the condition they’re in and to try and I realized how trying to smooth out these differences misunderstands the point of preservation. At the same time it was somewhat relieving to hear that not every scan is expected to fit the same format and that its up to me to decide how best to preserve the papers.

UCF Summer Internship Week #2

Hello everyone, and welcome to Week #2 of my Summer Internship with the Center for Humanities and Digital Research at UCF's College of the Arts and Humanities. While the first week of the internship was primarily spent planning out the structure of the overall project, it was this second week that I received my first hands-on experience with the scanner. Although we are still unable to scan many of the large bound newspaper books, Dr. Giroux drove to the New Smyrna Beach Museum of History (NSB MoH) this Monday to pick up a large collection of unbound newspapers, which can be scanned without a book cradle. Besides simply being unbound and easier to scan, these newspapers are the oldest at the museum and are in desperate need of preservation. Based on the plan we devised with the NSB MoH, these newspapers were the first documents scanned. As this was our first time actually operating the equipment, Dylan and I figured we should come in and work together at a time when Dr. Shier was in the office. Since the papers wouldn’t get there til late in the day on Monday, Dr. Shier let us know he would be in the office on Tuesday morning, and our keycards to the CHDR offices would be activated at that time. 

When I got to the space on Tuesday morning, Dr. Shier made sure to run through the process again and helped us get everything set up for our first scanning session. We started with the oldest of the papers, a 1887 Vol. 1, Iss. 1 copy of one of New Smyrna’s oldest newspapers, the “New Smyrna Breeze.” Immediately, the pros and cons of working with such old material became apparent. On the one hand, these newspapers from the late 19th century used no color. Luckily for Dylan and me, this meant that we could skip the process of checking the color saturation, and this made the setup slightly easier. On the other hand, their old age meant that these papers were extremely fragile and already fairly badly damaged. This made taking each paper out and flipping or rotating any pages extremely difficult. The edges of pages would often stick together, pages would be in multiple pieces like a puzzle, and words would be covered by creases or cracks in the paper. Although I initially quite enjoyed handling documents older than my great-grandfather, the novelty began to wear off by the second day and was quickly replaced by frustration at the painstaking focus it took just to flip a page without damaging the document. Although their fragility frustrated me, it also reminded me of the importance of the project. While many people may think that preserving old newspapers from a small town in Florida is not a major priority, if not for this project between CHDR and the NSB MoH, these documents would likely be forever lost to future generations. It's certainly not the New York Times, but the information in these papers has value to future generations that cannot be predicted and must be saved.

UCF Summer Internship Week #1

Hello, everyone! My name is Nathan Gregg, and welcome to my weekly Summer Internship Blog for the 2025 summer semester. I’m a rising senior at the University of Central Florida, currently majoring in History and pursuing a minor in Florida Studies. I’ve had a long-standing fascination with Florida history since my introduction in the 4th grade, and I’m especially interested in the early Spanish colonial period during the 16th century, as well as the period of U.S. encroachment into Florida during the early 19th century. While separated by hundreds of years of history, I’d argue that both these periods highlight Florida’s past role as one of North America’s truly unique frontiers. It is partly due to my passion for Florida history that I am currently working as a digitization intern with UCF’s CHDR (Center for Humanities and Digital Research) and the NSB MOH (New Smyrna Beach Museum of History) as part of a team aiming to digitize a large collection of historic newspapers from New Smyrna Beach. It’s this internship that I will be blogging about during these next 12 weeks, describing my personal experience working with the project as well as sharing any overall project updates. Although I have been interested in pursuing a career in Public History, recently I've begun to consider archival or preservation work after taking an introductory course on Historic Preservation. I hope that through this experience, I can get a better idea of what career path I would like to pursue post-grad. Furthermore, I’m looking forward to getting hands-on experience with both historical materials and the high-tech scanning equipment needed to digitize them. 

During this week, we had our first team meeting at CHDR in UCF’s Trevor Colbourn Hall to do preliminary introductions, receive instruction on how to operate the scanner, and connect with the staff at the NSB MOH to decide how we will structure the digitization process. Although I was nervous due to my lack of experience in the scanning and digitization of historical documents, it was reassuring to meet the team supervisor, Dr. Shier, and contributing members Dr. Giroux and Justin Whittington. They made sure to inform me, and the other interns, Daniel and Dylan, that due to the complexity of the scanner’s software, they expect it to take a while before we feel comfortable operating the scanner independently. This is due not only to the complexity of the scanner’s software, but its $100,000 price tag as well. The other interns and I also got an opportunity to handle several of the bound volumes of newspapers that we’ll be digitizing within the project. Unfortunately, all but one of them are too big for the current book cradle needed, and as such, interns in the UCF engineering department are designing and constructing a larger cradle to accommodate the others. Although still in good condition, I was surprised by the fragility of even just the 50-year-old newspapers. When I considered how many papers we will be scanning that are even older than this, it struck me how important the digital preservation of these documents is. Our time concluded with a Zoom meeting with Greg and Sandra at the NSB MOH, in which we decided what order to start digitizing the newspapers and organized to have Dr. Giroux pick up some smaller books and unbound newspapers that we can begin scanning without a larger book cradle. By next week, we’ll have this first batch of materials at CHDR and can begin the digitization process in earnest. As of now, I am somewhat apprehensively excited to handle over 100-year-old documents and begin getting more familiar with the digitization process.