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As a nerd of many things (photography, science, math, etc.), I'm a big fan of looking at original historical artifacts and holding them in my hands. As an IU student, I had the wonderful opportunity to do a lot of that at the Lilly Library, home to an Oscar, medieval calendars, Ernie Pyle's letters and an original Gutenberg New Testament. The library also prides itself on its large collection of Abraham Lincoln documents, and by large I mean 490 items by and about Honest Abe.

In honor of Lincoln's birthday (side note: it's also my dad's birthday), I decided to stop by the library this weekend. I was in Bloomington already for Indiana News Photographers Association photo contest judging, so it wasn't much effort to walk over there and look at documents I never saw when I was a student. I held in my own two hands a letter he wrote to a distant family member from Kentucky, a directive to Secretary of State William H. Seward, and the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. That broke my nerd quota for the day, even if some of them were facsimiles.

Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Notice some scratching out and, "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free..."

I'm sure that somewhere down the road, I'll put together a strictly-stills photo story on the Super Bowl in Indianapolis for my portfolio. For now, though, I've decided to put the audio and video I gathered in the last week and a half (which started out as just snippets to remember the experience by) to good use in the multimedia story below. This week has been wonderful for my city, and I hope this gives you a good idea of how much went on downtown, both in the Village and elsewhere on game day.

(If the file below is too big for you, you can watch it on YouTube.)

Be careful. This is new HTML5 territory, so depending on your browser, the controls that the video serves you might not work. If that's the case, click directly on the video to play and pause it. Oddly enough, though, the scrubber will still work.

Unless you tried really, really hard to not be a part of American culture last night and this morning, you already know that the New York Giants beat the New England Patriots 21-17 in Super Bowl XLVI in my home town of Indianapolis. I'll be working on a multimedia project in short order, but for now here are some more photos from this week, all of which also appear on Demotix here, here, here, here and here.

New York Giants fans with balloons outside the Indiana Convention Center