Sandy Storyline is a collaborative, multimedia documentary about the impact of Hurricane Sandy. I participated as a volunteer media maker, collaborating with photographers Adrianne Mathiowetz and Kisha Bari to collect stories from neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.
Sandy Storyline was selected for the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival’s interactive, multimedia exhibit Storyscapes, a space where people could explore the stories collected by Storyline and add their own.
In 1880, T.P. Keator and Thad Butler took a trip to Cleveland. They were the editors of the Wabash Plain Dealer, the local paper in Wabash, Indiana.
They had heard about a man in Cleveland experimenting with electric lighting.
And Keator and Butler had an idea: If they could bring just a few of these electric lights to Wabash, they could light up the whole town. And if they could pull it off, Wabash would be the first town in the world that could say it was entirely illuminated by electricity.
In its early days, railway travel out west was an unpleasant business. Trips could take anywhere from one day to one week, and people were treated a lot like cargo. Railroad companies just kind of put them on the train and sent them off.
But of all the indignities of rail travel – smoke and dust in the cars, cramped quarters, dizzying climbs through the mountains – the most miserable part of the trip was the food.
Smartphones have become incredibly powerful tools for blind people. A phone’s camera can identify money and read text, and GPS navigation tells blind users where they are and what’s nearby. Most mobile accessibility tools can be found through a handful of useful apps on standard smartphones, but there’s a team of developers in Israel working on a new Android phone called Ray. It’s a standard Android phone with an interface designed for blind users.
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There’s so much to know about what’s happening in the world around us, and that information gives us insights into patterns and changes that could have a big impact on our lives.
But finding these trends requires a lot of data – and somebody has to go out and get it.
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Unemployment numbers in the Midwest are bad. Not as bad as when the recession was at its worst, but there are still a lot of people looking for jobs. Even so, we keep hearing that some employers can’t find enough skilled workers.
Wendy Whitmore is the CEO of EMR Approved, a company in Chicago that works with doctors and hospitals that are making the switch to electronic medical records. Four years ago, EMR Approved didn’t exist. Back then, Wendy Whitmore was running SSG Consulting, an IT consulting firm that wasn’t doing so well.
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The Pictured Rocks National Lake Shore is a special place for Midwestern ice climbing. Every February, hundreds of climbers meet in Munising for Michigan Ice Fest. That’s because the Lake Superior shoreline has one of the highest concentrations of accessible ice climbs in North America.
Usually, Bryan DeAugustine is a middle school principal. But this weekend, he’s a volunteer instructor at Michigan Ice Fest.
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