Boston Athenæum

October 21, 2015 at the Boston Athenæum. The Athenæum’s collections have been used by scholars and researchers for more than 200 years. In more recent decades, filmmakers and producers have used the collections to inform their projects, such as Kitty Eisele’s The Civil War, a documentary film series directed by Ken Burns with images from the Athenæum’s Prints & Photographs collection. As Supervising Senior Editor at NPR’s Morning Edition, Kitty Eisele makes her living with words. Many years before that, she worked in pictures – as an Emmy Award-winning producer of The Civil War series with Ken Burns, and other documentaries on American history and culture. In fact, the Athenæum’s collections were used to tell the story in The Civil War–Ken Burns and his team researched the series at 10 ½ Beacon Street. Now, as digital media becomes more dominant in our everyday lives, she’s found herself asking how we communicate in this new language – a primarily visual language. What does it mean to use images as an incre