Introducing History Rhymes
I’ve long been interested in the long view. When I left my position at Illinois Public Media in 2015 to work on other projects, one of the projects was exploratory storytelling using archival media. For the past century or so we’ve stored so much of our historical resources in audiovisual records. In some important ways, these materials have become our memory.
I don’t believe everything I see and hear, and I know media archives can be propagandistic just like any other form of communication. But they can also represent context.
So I launched a new blog focused on detecting the echos from history reflecting through the past few decades of archival media. I hope to announce a more ambitious project of turning old media into new media, but I’ll leave that pretty cryptic for now. I’m working my way through some 30,196 media objects in the Illinois Public Media Archives, trying to find the signals amidst the noise, and that is consuming pretty much all of my “free time.”
But I can’t help sharing some of the gold as I find it, so I hope you enjoy my new History Rhymes journal.