Social Media Documentary

Manchester, New Hampshire sits at a place in the Merrimack River where there are falls and rapids. This part of the river had supported native peoples for some thousands of years. In the late eighteenth century, Samuel Blodgett had the dream of building a canal and transforming the small village of Derryfield into a mill city that might rival Manchester, England. In rather short order – not without setbacks and false steps – mills began to spring up. Before the mid-century mark Henry David Thoreau would travel through the new Manchester and describe burgeoning mills and city life. One consequence of prosperity was the founding of a public library in 1854.

Our aim within the Amoskeag Triptych project is to examine and present the interweavings of the river, the mills, and the library – the sense of place and space. There exist already numerous resources on the mills and the library, the native people and the immigrants, the marvelous and the sad entwined in such growth and change. We provide ways of gathering together images and stories, of documenting people and place, affording mechanisms for thick description.

Within this small testbed we currently have a few images and a few videos as test pieces. They are not presented as complete pieces.