2025 Innovator in Residence Creates Digital Adventures from the Collections
Vivian Li’s Experiment Will Offer Guided Local Activities Inspired by Library Resources
The Library of Congress has appointed Seattle-based artist and developer Vivian Li as 2025 Innovator in Residence. With her project, “Anywhere Adventures,” Li will create a website experience for audiences in selected U.S. cities to learn about their hometowns through items from the Library’s digital collections.
Through her popular social media series about the Seattle Fremont Bridge in 2023, Li found others who shared her enthusiasm for entertaining and informative stories about local history. As 2025 Innovator in Residence, she will work with Library staff to highlight unique, amusing, and awe-inspiring collection items that enable young people to discover the Library’s online resources about their own communities.
“With the Library of Congress so far away, I thought it surely wouldn’t have anything for me – but when I started exploring the digital collections, I found so many stories about my town!” said Li.
“I searched for Macomb, the town I grew up in, and found a snippet from an Ohio newspaper talking about bootleggers on the run. This led to a string of research about what it was like during Prohibition, and I learned about a 1921 scandal where a bootlegger in the nearby town of Colchester hired disgraced Chicago ‘Black Sox’ to play as ringers in a baseball game against Macomb. I didn’t even know Macomb used to have a baseball team!”
“In my time as Innovator, I hope to be able to dig through the collections and share some of these treasured stories on social media so people might become curious to do some exploration on their own,” added Li.
“Anywhere Adventures” will spotlight histories from three U.S. cities nominated by Americans in early 2025. The finished website will provide self-guided tours and activities for each location, all culminating in a personalized, scrapbook-like “zine” participants can share with others.
Vivian Li is an illustrator, comics artist, and web developer from Macomb, Illinois. Since graduating from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with a degree in computer science, she has been creating projects that combine her visual side with her ability to code. Li previously served as an Artist in Residence creating digital data visualizations for Seattle’s historic Fremont Bridge in a partnership between the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture and Seattle Department of Transportation. She published the first volume of her comic cookbook on homemade Chinese cuisine, ABC Cooking, in 2023. Li has contributed comics to Papeachu Review, Fogland Press, and Portland Zine Symposium.
About the Residency
The Innovator in Residence program is an initiative of LC Labs. The program invites arts and technology practitioners to conduct research with Library staff and demonstrate new paradigms for engaging with archives in the cultural heritage sector. Previous Innovators in Residence include data artist Jer Thorp, Citizen DJ creator Brian Foo, Newspaper Navigator creator Benjamin Charles Germain Lee, Speculative Annotation artist Courtney McClellan, and Seeing Lost Enclaves creator Jeffrey Yoo Warren.
The Library’s Digital Innovation Division, LC Labs, supports the Library’s mission to engage, inspire and inform Congress and the American people with a universal and enduring source of knowledge and creativity. LC Labs is home to the Library of Congress Innovator in Residence Program; leads experiments with AI and other new technologies; and supports communities in exploring the Library’s data and digital collections. Learn more about the Library’s approach to digital strategy and visit labs.loc.gov to see this work in action.
The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library, offering access to the creative record of the United States — and extensive materials from around the world — both on-site and online. It is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office. Explore collections, reference services and other programs and plan a visit at loc.gov; access the official site for U.S. federal legislative information at congress.gov; and register creative works of authorship at copyright.gov.
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Media Contact: Elaina Finkelstein, [email protected]
PR 24-090
10-16-2024
ISSN 0731-3527