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.

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.