{"id":41,"date":"2026-07-24T17:00:43","date_gmt":"2026-07-24T17:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu\/librarianinprogress\/?p=41"},"modified":"2026-07-24T17:25:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-24T17:25:00","slug":"reflection-blog-the-power-of-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu\/librarianinprogress\/2026\/07\/24\/reflection-blog-the-power-of-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflection Blog: The Power of Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u00a0really<\/em> love this module and that it is included in this course. I personally am a big sharer and contextualizer because I am a big believer that sharing stories will lead to more empathy and understanding and that will lead to stronger communities. I see this both in my personal and professional worlds and am very grateful for the opportunity to continue the exploration of this topic right here.<\/p>\n

Like mentioned above, I have a lot of professional experience with stories. One of my most honored experiences was working as a transcript editor for a Spanish language oral history project that produced the first Spanish material to be collected and housed in my college’s archives. The project, called The Listeners Project: Queremos Escucharte<\/em> (TLP) began with the Colectivo de Arte Social (Socially Engaged Art Collective) which is a “group of creative immigrants and immigrant advocates from the Walla Walla Immigrant Rights Coalition” and is produced in partnership with the Walla Walla Public Library and the Whitman College and Northwest Archives (TLPWW, n.d.). The project collects oral histories of the Latine and immigrant community members that have been left out of the region’s history. The history of the region I was getting from my education was mostly focused on the westward expansion\/settler colonialism\/indigenous displacement side of things. TLP aims to collect a more recent history of the influx of Mexican and Central American immigrants to the area to work in agriculture and affirm that story among the context of the broader history that includes the aforementioned well recorded history.<\/p>\n

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BeReal from May 2023: Pictures of my time interning at my college’s archives which included editing transcripts of oral histories<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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BeReal from April 2023: Pictures of my time interning at my college’s archives which included editing transcripts of oral histories<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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BeReal from March 2023: Pictures of my time interning at my college’s archives which included editing transcripts of oral histories<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As the transcript editor, I was some of the first people to hear these stories (outside of the interviewer of course). Part of the job too was organizing the notes from the interview and helping the archivists condense them into both Spanish and English finding aids for each of the audio recordings and written transcripts. I am semi-fluent in Spanish so this was an awesome opportunity to keep flexing that language muscle and making sure that these stories would eventually be accessible and findable to all in the community. I know that this project means a lot to the Walla Walla community and has fostered a really great partnership between the community, the public library, and the college. I’m grateful to have had a small part in making it happen.<\/p>\n

Separate thought:<\/p>\n

Has anyone heard about\u00a0Book from the Ground: From Point to Point<\/em><\/a> by Bing Xu? In the lecture, Micheal mentioned how Emojis are great story telling mechanisms and I immediately thought of this book! It’s a story about the day in the life of an office worker told completely using emojis, symbols, logos and emoticons. It has no words just symbols and is paired with another art piece by the same artist\/author called “A Book from the Sky<\/a>” that is made up of entirely made up glyphs that looks like traditional Chinese characters. Both are worth looking up they are very cool and thought provoking.<\/p>\n

References<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
A Book from the Sky<\/i>. (2026). In Wikipedia<\/i>. https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/w\/index.php?title=A_Book_from_the_Sky&oldid=1361932926<\/a><\/div>\n
TLPWW: Home<\/i>. (n.d.). TLP:Queremos Escucharte. Retrieved July 22, 2026, from https:\/\/www.tlpww.org\/home<\/a><\/div>\n
Xu, B. (2018). Book from the Ground: From point to point<\/i>. MIT Press.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u00a0really love this module and that it is included in this course. I personally am a big sharer and contextualizer because I am a big believer that sharing stories will lead to more empathy and understanding and that will lead to stronger communities. I see this both in my personal and professional worlds and am … Continue reading Reflection Blog: The Power of Stories<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":821,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu\/librarianinprogress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu\/librarianinprogress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu\/librarianinprogress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu\/librarianinprogress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/821"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu\/librarianinprogress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu\/librarianinprogress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47,"href":"https:\/\/287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu\/librarianinprogress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41\/revisions\/47"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu\/librarianinprogress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu\/librarianinprogress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu\/librarianinprogress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}