Neon signs and baked Alaska

We’ve been meaning to update you on the exciting results of our projects with five University of Michigan graduate students back in March.

We had a great week together: the students showed us how to do amazing things with our website, and we gave them t-shirts and introduced them to Baked Alaska at Sabatino’s.

Sara with the group at lunch (L-R): Yiqing Li, Maria Smith, Soohyun Park, Kimberly Springer, Krishna Vadrevu

In just five days, they created some marvelous new tools for mediaburn.org:

“Voices of Cabrini” portal. This page suggests research pathways for viewers who want to dig deeper into the topics explored in “Voices of Cabrini,” whether by following a particular character like Mark Pratt, a place like George Robbins’s Barbershop, or a topic like Chicago politics or community organizing. It’s a wonderful template for how we can present our other historically significant collections of camera original footage.

Revamped Educators page. This engaging page features a dozen curriculum guides and is a launching point for us to be able to add many more activity guides to help teachers at all levels use our collection in their classrooms.

Sleek new “About Us” page and other behind the scenes improvements.

Now, enjoy this video of a visit to a neon sign company in Chicago. Another interesting find from our collection of camera originals, it was shot by Eric Scholl for Chicago Slices in 1993, but it was never used or edited until now. Eric is an accomplished documentary producer and associate professor at Columbia College.

You can watch his entire trip to Triangle Sign Company at Media Burn Archive.