About me, starting the blog

This will be my first blog post out of 15 for the spring 2026 school semester! Thankfully Dr. Scot French provided me with some questions so I won’t get stuck. From this internship, I really hope to gain more experience on the history side of my degrees. I’ve done education and software engineering internships in the past, but nothing ever directly related to my history degree. I saw this in my UCF email and thought it would be perfect for my last semester here. I am glad I took the step to reply and show my interest in this program. Weirdly enough, Dr. French’s son is also a dual major with history and computer science, something I rarely ever see.

First day with everyone

Unfortunately, I came down with the flu but I was able to join over zoom. Everyone in the group was able to introduce themselves and we talked about what exactly our role will be during this internship. Handling and scanning in historical documents is a major part of the program as well as recording metadata on an excel spreadsheet. Dr. Scot French went into the notorious history of the TCH building with the explanation of how the funding for the place was not used properly; however, public history at UCF was able to secure a place to do dedicated research. I was really impressed with the scanner and how Jeff Bezos’s wife was able to provide CHDR with an amazing donation to support the efforts of humanities research. The past interns went on to explain how they enter metadata through a spreadsheet with descriptions of date issue, volume, description of any damage, & etc. When I heard this, I just thought about how nice it would be to have a database connected to a site ensuring that the data would be in a secure location. Also, this would allow a public side where information can be easily accessible for those who want it. Talking about websites, I had no idea this internship would require us to make our own little area for posting these weekly! My friend was able to point me to this framework called astro that makes building a blog so easy to do. I’ve been tweaking the front end all day, but there is always more work to do so the site feels good to be on.

Scanning and information pointers

The previous interns and Dr. French pointed us in some direction to look at when it comes to recording the data. Looking where things are placed to get the full attention of the readers is key, one of them being the air conditioning at the beach. It shows tourists that there will be some places to cool off rather than drowning in the blazing sun all day. Having this line at the top of a news article really shows that the editors are trying to entice people with AC. After going through some of the pages, the group walked over to the scanner. It was very interesting to see how scanning could become a long and tedious task based on how it is done. One trick to optimize time is scanning only one half of the book (even or odd pages) then going back to the rest. For one, no book turning will be needed, but periodically checking to ensure no pages were skipped is vital. There was some problem with the path of the program not being detected, but I’m sure there's just a simple mistake we were overlooking.

Ending notes

It has been awhile since I’ve had the pleasure of writing, so this first blog may be all over the place. I wanted to be more personal for this week’s post, but I’m sure as the internship goes on and I’m working with the material, my writing style will be more uniform. I am so excited to start the process (and for my sickness to disappear)!