This practicum introduces Telar, a free and open-source platform that addresses this gap. Built by historians on over a decade of community-focused digital public history work and classroom teaching in Latin America and the United States, Telar enables anyone to build interactive visual narratives around high-resolution images and publish them as free-standing websites — without writing code, managing servers, or maintaining databases. Users write content in a familiar environment, Google Sheets, and Telar weaves it into beautiful narrative exhibitions published through GitHub Pages at no cost. Telar narratives follow a carefully designed layered structure, allowing users to move from broad context to close analysis of individual sources — making it possible for the same material to engage audiences with varying levels of expertise.

The session is organised in three parts. A brief opening presentation introduces the model of visual storytelling that Telar enables — its origin in Colonial Landscapes, a bilingual digital history project on colonial Latin America; its design rooted in accessibility and digital sustainability; and the connection between large-scale archival digitisation and the tools needed to make those materials usable for teaching and outreach. This is followed by a hands-on workshop which makes up the bulk of the session, in which participants will work through the full Telar workflow: setting up a project, selecting IIIF images from digitised collections, authoring narrative content, and publishing a working site. No prior technical experience is required — only a laptop and a web browser. The session closes with a discussion of concrete next steps and applications.

The practicum also introduces participants to the IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) ecosystem — the open standard through which libraries, archives, and museums around the world now make high-resolution images available online. Historians increasingly encounter IIIF resources in their work, but few are aware of the tools available for working with them. Participants will learn how to find and use IIIF images from major institutional collections, a skill with applications well beyond this particular platform.

Visual storytelling with primary sources is a skill best learned by doing. Participants will leave not only with a working project and the knowledge to build more, but with a practical framework — and a free, open-source tool — for incorporating visual narratives into their own teaching, outreach, and public history work, and for offering students a form of historical writing beyond the traditional essay.