Fortepan, IA, an open-source platform for digitizing historical photos, is putting together a yearlong project focusing on Waverly. University of Northern Iowa faculty and students have scanned over 7,000 photos of the city. Communications and Media professor Bettina Fabos is the director of the project that aims to scan and enlarge high resolution images in an effort to further preserve the city’s history.
“We explore connections between past and present. It’s important to show what UNI students can do and how they engage with community outreach,” Fabos said.
Mia Chatwell, a History and Museum Studies major, is working on the project for an internship. She’s scanned around 600 pictures so far and she’s seen everything from town fairs to floods.
“I like seeing all the old pictures. You can see things like an old car with a donkey sitting in the back or their water tower being built. I enjoy watching the progression of the town,” she said.
We want students to recognize the power of storytelling and its ability to create identity as well as how to grapple with the ethical responsibility of sharing other peoples’ stories. — Danielle McGeough, professor of women’s studies and director of the Interpreters Theatre
Olivia Luhring, an English major with a Public History minor, is a senior at UNI. She is participating in the Fortepan project for an internship for her minor. She has scanned hundreds of photos from the Waverly Public Library and newspapers.
“I know very little about Iowa history in general. I lived overseas for most of my life, but I have a lot of family in Iowa so there’s a bit of a disconnect I have with my family, especially as a lot of them have farming backgrounds and I simply do not. However, with this project, I get to see a wide variety of that history: farming to the hospitals, the way the streets looked, and more. For me, it is a way I can connect to Iowa when I wasn’t able to before,” said Luhring.
The Waverly project includes more activities than just collecting photos, UNI students and facility have used the project to create digital art projects, including animations and projections. They have also created wheat pasted murals.
Professor of Women’s Studies and director of Interpreters Theatre, Danielle McGeough is using the Fortepan project in her Storytelling and Identity, Communication, and Media course. In May 2023, McGeough’s group met with different community members in Waverly to learn about their town identity. They took a walking tour of the town and participated in a workshop on how to design the course. The students will write original stories based on town history with help from the Fortepan photos and experiences from Waverly residents themselves.
“We do foundational work on storytelling and how stories shape identity. It’s a student-led project where they are finding pictures that relate to the stories. For example, a mother and daughter graduating from college at the same time. The stories may not be of the individuals, but they represent the collective,” McGeough said.
McGeough believes the project is important for students to learn through doing.
“We want students to recognize the power of storytelling and its ability to create identity as well as how to grapple with the ethical responsibility of sharing other peoples’ stories,”
McGeough’s students and others will share their work to a free audience at Waverly’s ThinkWell coffee shop on December 3rd at 2:00pm in an event called Storytelling and Community: Waverly Edition
To view the scanned images of Waverly and other cities: https://fortepan.us/
