THANKS to everybody who helped out with this!

• Tom Woodward’s mockup of before-and-after photos
• Tom Woodward’s code for the before/after photo page on GitHub
• Working spreadsheet of addresses with links to old and new photos
• The Jackson Ward Then and Now group on Flickr
• Participants: Julie Arendt, Melanie Barker, Gardner Campbell, Nell Chenault, Kathleen Delaurenti, Anna Groves, Eric Johnson, Ben Lamb, Ashley Maynor, Erin White, Sara Williams, Tom Woodward

Update 3/19: VCU Libraries Archives Coordinator Ray Bonis sent along a collection of even older photos of the Jackson Ward neighborhood in 1907 from the Internet Archive.

Original proposal:

So much of the South and southern identity is tied to a sense of place. Time passes, people come and go, but geography stays the same. I am fascinated by this idea.

VCU Libraries has a great set of 1970s photos of Richmond’s historically African-American Jackson Ward district both in our Digital Collections site and on Flickr.

I propose we stroll over to Jackson Ward, make then-and-now photos of some of these structures, and find a way to share these photos in a way that tells a story about the neighborhood and the city.

I’d like to have a session about telling stories digitally, using whatever tools, on whichever platforms. Depending on our interest, this could be show-and-tell about interesting stories you’ve seen or created, brief walkthroughs of tools you’ve used, ideas about best practices, etc. Not thinking of a full-on intro to Digital Storytelling, like Bud Deihl’s workshop Friday, though maybe those of us who attend it can use some of what we learn there as a springboard for discussion & ideas.

Alternatively, if we want to run a Make-type session, we could try to create a story told collaboratively across many platforms, to give us all a hand at trying new tools. In this kind of scenario, perhaps we could all resolve to try a new (to us) platform for storytelling, but offer to act as resources for each other — e.g. I don’t have an Instagram account, so maybe I could try to tell part of our story on there and learn something about it, while answering questions about, e.g., WordPress. Not necessarily thinking of a complete/coherent narrative here; it could be finding new ways to present different aspects of a fictional project (Newspapers to Prisoners; Enslaved Geographies; etc.).

I like fiction and telling stories, but the practical takeaways I see for participants would be:

• Exposure to new tools
• Ideas about pitfalls & virtues of different kinds of storytelling
• Examples of online engagement/storytelling that might inspire you to try new things with promoting/discussing your project
• (Perhaps) experience using a new-to-you storytelling tool