Aragon alumni and former Outlook editor Michael Herrera hopes to preserve the history of Aragon’s student-run newspaper, The Aragon Outlook, in an easily accessible online archive, which can be found at archives.aragonoutlook.org. The Outlook, formerly named The Aristocrat, has been publishing editions since the school’s opening in 1961. Around 40 years of issues of The Aristocrat are now available online.
After graduating from Aragon in 2018, Herrera continued his education at Stanford University studying Symbolic Systems, a major combining computer science and social science. As his senior capstone project, Herrera created a website with an accessible and searchable archive of many past editions of Aragon’s newspaper.
“[Creating the archive] was something that I really wanted to do while I was at The Outlook,” Herrera said. “I was both a features editor and technology editor, and while I had a really big interest in technology, I didn’t have the skill set to make [the archive] a reality.”
While a mostly complete physical archive exists in the publishing office, it is difficult to search through. In order to make the archives easily accessible, Herrera made digital scans of the newspaper.
“You can look up a search term [on the website] and it brings up all the scans of the editions that have that search term in it,” Herrera said. “It’s easily text-searchable, which I think is really important.”
Digitizing the newspaper and making it searchable were complicated tasks. Having an outside company digitize over 60 years of newspapers and operate the website would be an extremely expensive job. This left Herrera with the challenge of doing it all himself.
“Once I figured out that the basics were doable, I started working on it and doing some more investigation into the technologies during the spring of 2021,” Herrera said. “Over the summer of 2021, I picked up the physical papers from The Outlook office and … scanned a lot of those. Over winter break, I did all the work of the conversion, and most recently, I added some finishing touches on the website.”
The digital archive preserves history in an accessible format that is available to the public. Whether for a research project or out of curiosity, anyone in the community can access and search through Aragon’s history. When asked about his motivations for making the archive, Herrera emphasized the importance of learning from history.
“I think it’s a really useful tool for students to see what things have looked like in the past because having a better understanding of the past gives you a better understanding of what’s possible in the future,” Herrera said. “If you see what has changed overtime at Aragon, then that can give you an idea of how you can be part of future change.”
Aragon history teacher Heather Sadlon elaborated on the interconnectedness of the media and history.
“Whether it’s school media or traditional media, newspapers play a really important role,” Sadlon said. “[Newspapers] ask questions so that we can understand why decisions are made and make changes if we as a community feel it is important to make [these] changes.”
With newspapers being an influential aspect of history, having an archive of past newspapers will allow people to understand issues of the past and how people’s mindsets have evolved since then.
“When older pieces of information get lost, they’re completely lost, so this idea of creating an archive preserves that information,” Sadlon said. “Part of what makes media useful is if it’s accessible to regular people, so having multiple ways that you can go back and easily find information seems really beneficial.”
The digital archive of Aragon’s newspaper will allow students and community members to reflect on Aragon’s history and study the change that has occurred in the 61 years since Aragon opened. Students now have more resources to explore the community’s history and access parts of previous newspaper editions. The digital archive of the Aragon Outlook can be found at archives.aragonoutlook.org.
