Taking a virtual road trip through food and politics

I’m a big fan of personal projects. We all have them — we say we’re going to to develop a web site dedicated to our favorite star or that we’re going to finally get around to making that digital scrapbook. Right now, I’m working on one myself that I’ll blog about soon; I want to make sure to give it a little more meat before showing it off.

That’s all to say that I wanted to talk about an awesome project a friend of mine from undergrad has been working on. Brian was [and, even as an alumni a few years out, still is] the web editor for our college’s newspaper, The Cornellian. So, needless to say, he’s a web savvy person. And he’s also a born and bred Iowan with incredible respect and fondness for the state.

So, over the last few years, Brian developed his own website to document some of the smaller, lesser known and off-the-beaten-path places in the great state of Iowa. Iowa Backroads is a project of showcasing a state that is too often merely considered flyover land for most people, even though there are places that get huge acclaim in major outlets (…and it’s worth mentioning that the Lincoln Cafe is indeed located in the same down as our alma mater, Cornell). Some of the cool places featured on Brian’s blog so far have included Mt. Vernon’s awesome Bijou Theatre, the world’s larged bull in Audubon, and the Amish Stringtown grocery store.

What strikes me as cool about the project is that it’s a living record. Many of these locations Brian documents are historical to their towns or are attractions to a particular town. In an era where rural states like Iowa are losing population at alarming rates and seeking to learn what and how they can maintain their young people, it’s refreshing to see these places can maintain themselves and these small towns can emerge as centers for local business and commerce. And these places don’t have to keep their businesses to the locals — Brian’s giving them exposure for people who may otherwise not understand that there is a lot of charm and life in the small state. He is, if you will, helping spread the word about the gems all over the state. I think beyond that, he’s helping promote the culture of appreciating local business. It’s a small part, much in the same way that spots for local culture in films like What Would Jesus Buy spread the word that rural life is not dead life, but instead, it is full of people and places with character and history hoping to keep their waning populations afloat. In fact, there was a wonderful post today courtesy of the Daily Yonder about a local Mexican restaurant in Denison, Iowa that made a great point about there still being a great multicultural population in small town Iowa.

Brian’s begun to work on another project at the same time he works on Iowa Backroads. He’s taking photographs of the county courthouses in each of Iowa’s 99 counties, as well as taking photographs of local post offices. And he doesn’t just limit it to Iowa, either. Brian has albums and entries in his Flickr and on his blog featuring sites in Illinois, South Dakota, and Minnesota, among others.

While he’s not quite sure where he’s going to go with these projects yet, they remind me a lot of what Stephen Bloom and Peter Feldstein did in their book The Oxford Project. I think that what is starting out as a one man project has the potential to get much more exposure — from a historical and digital collections standpoint, it seems to me there are a lot of opportunities to develop a historical portal.

There are two things that really stand out to me about Brian’s projects. The first is that it’s a nice comfort to remember a place that made me so happy and with which I have so many good memories. It gives me the opportunity to travel back to Iowa without ever leaving my seat or booking a ticket. Brian’s also done some minor marketing, sending postcards to some of his fans and to the places which he has spotlighted, letting us know about the site.

Second, and perhaps most importantly, it shows an initiative to not only think up a project but actually follow through on it. How many times have we all thought about how great it would be if we did _____ or we should do _____. It’s quite exciting to see someone do this on their own accord and know that they’re not only doing a cool project for himself and his friends, but also for the [digital] historical record.

I hope as more people dive into the digital world that more projects like this pop up. While state and local tourism boards can pour money into projects, I find that the personal approach to documenting what is cool about where they live or what they love is more real and authentic. I’m more inspired to print out a page from someone’s blog than I am to hop onto the state or local tourism website.

It’s also inspiring me to get on with getting on about my own [and much, much smaller] project. But while I continue to procrastinate on that, I’ll spend a few more hours in my virtual road trip. If nothing else, I’m building a repository of great places to set future stories or in which stories I read may themselves be set.