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Documenting Where We Live

Documenting Where We Live-Image
A Roundup of April's Community Powered Events and Activities

This month, the Community Powered Project Coordinators have been hosting programs that inspire community members to document the places that we call home and to see familiar places from a fresh perspective.

Emily, the CPPC in Spooner, hosted an Interactive Storywalk in downtown Spooner in collaboration with the Spooner Memorial Library. The goal of this event was to help folks in Spooner see the downtown in a new light, in this case, as a collection of brilliant colors and shapes! Though the event didn’t have a strong turnout during the first run in November or during this second run (in part likely due to the weather), it was a way for Emily to work with the library staff to experiment with different place-based storytelling technologies, including HiveMechanic and Actionbound. Actionbound was later used to document and share Spooner’s railroad heritage.

Anthony, our CPPC in Racine, continued to offer workshops at the Racine Public Library to introduce the Racine community to different ways they could use technology to share their stories. On April 24th, Anthony hosted a Photography 101 workshop at the Racine Public Library. Through this workshop, Anthony hoped to equip community members with the skills to use cameras to document their own perspectives on the people, places, and things around them.

At the end of April Emily co-hosted another History Harvest event to help celebrate, preserve, and share local history. The first part of the event featured a BadgerTalk from Dr. Tom Broman, the co-director of Wisconsin 101, a statewide public history project. During the second portion, community members were invited to share about the meaningful objects that they brought with them. Emily helped mentor the library staff as they took photos of the objects and interviewed folks about their object. After the event, they worked together to create videos to share these object histories with the community. This event continued the build the library’s digital collection of community objects. Listen to the stories of these three objects collected by Ivo!

Ivo collected these objects in Rusk County, WI, and believes they are remnants of Wisconsin’s Logging Industry. Click to learn more about these interesting objects.

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