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This spring, a group of editors sat in a white-walled conference room at The New York Times, throwing out ideas.

The 60th anniversary of the day that Hawaii became a state was coming up. The editors, part of a team that tells stories through The Times’s vast photo archive in a project called Past Tense, wanted to highlight images from across America .

They also wanted to find an interesting way to tell the story.

If they ran a slide show, readers might lose interest after clicking through a few photographs. A long article with a running list of photos could lose readers well before they made it to Wyoming . They wanted it to be engaging.