Anywhere Adventures Story Submission Extended!

Anywhere Adventures is a mobile-first website that brings local history to users through comics and travel logs. In the first year, 2025-2026 Innovator in Residence Vivian Li developed stories for three locations: Seattle, Washington, Chicago, Illinois, and Southeast Wyoming. She is now seeking story submissions from readers for two new locations: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and the Mississippi Sound. In this guest post,  Vivian shares about a virtual research workshop she hosted in March and announces the  extension of the submission deadline for stories.

One of the themes that has been arising for me over my time as Innovator is the idea of:

The Casual Researcher

Someone who has maybe never visited an archive before, who has an interest in learning things, but perhaps hasn’t tried finding new information themselves.

I definitely am a casual researcher – and through this residency, I’ve found it’s really fun to comb through items and find something that sparks curiosity. It feels intimidating, especially visiting an archive in person, but digital collections make it easier than ever because you can visit from the comfort of your own home.

If you’ve never tried it before, try out the researcher hat for yourself, and submit your stories about Pittsburgh and the Mississippi Sound. We’re extending the submission deadline for stories to Friday, May 8, 2026 to accommodate more submissions.

It can be hard to get started, though, so last month, I held an online research workshop as a crash course for new casual researchers!

Research Pathways:

I’ve noticed myself travelling along two research pathways:

1. Knowing what I want to find
2. Putting myself in a cool collection and opening myself up for new discoveries.

Path 1: Knowing what I want to find

Lots of Anywhere Adventures stories stem from questions someone might have when going around town – and often, parks, streets, or buildings are named after people I hadn’t heard of before. Like Alice Ball Park here in Seattle – named after the Seattle born chemist Alice Ball whose work helped compound a treatment for leprosy. One of the people involved in her work was Dr. Harry T. Hollmann, a US public health official who worked at the Leprosy Investigation Station.

I wanted to draw Dr. Hollmann as part of my comic, but no picture of him was easily found on the Internet. I tried searching his name through a bunch of online digital archives –  Chronicling America, the International History of Leprosy’s database, and the Hawai’i State Archives, and though his name would appear, I still found no photographs.

At this point, I used the Library of Congress’s wonderful Ask a Librarian service, which connects library patrons with real librarians to help them on their research journeys. They directed me to the Hawai’i State Archives, and so I emailed them with my question, and they responded with a link to his photograph!

Path 2: Putting myself in a cool place

It’s really easy to get lost looking at the endless amount of items found online at LOC.GOV – whether it’s reading through old newspapers, crossing your eyes looking at stereographs, or listening to recordings of interviews collected in folklife. Letting yourself wander through collections is a great way to encounter things you never even imagined.

One of my favorite collections to get lost in is HABS/HAER/HALS, which features notable buildings, landscapes, and miscellaneous structures around the country. The records often include detailed reports of various facts about the place – like how it was built, what it was used for, or other facts of significance.

There are HABS/HAER/HALS reports for places all around the country! It’s a great place to start browsing the Library of Congress.

My hope is if you’ve never researched before, and you don’t feel like a researcher at all, you can give it a whirl! The journey of discovery is so fun, and it’s very satisfying to find something that you thought might have been lost to time.

If you want more detailed research paths, I’m drawing some more of them online.