LEWISTON — Talk about bringing history to life.

Just after sundown last Wednesday night, a group of about 50 people crowded around the front of a building at Lisbon and Pine streets, staring up at a storefront window where the history of Lisbon Street unfolded before their eyes.

Up on a screen shaped like an old-style TV were images of trolleys moving up and down Lisbon Street. There were moving images of crowded shops and bustling sidewalks. Standing out there upon the very street these images were taken, the feeling some got was that it was like time travel.

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Which in a way, it was.

Deemed “Lisbon Street: A Street of Stories,” this Bates College project is described as a digital storytelling event, one that uses archival images to weave tales of Lewiston’s downtown in the days of old.

Afraid you’ll miss it? Not to worry. The 10-minute slideshow will be looping right there on the windows of Munka Studio 24 hours a day, seven days a week right up to Dec. 20.

The project is the work of Courtney Smith, associate professor of theater at Bates College, and a group of students who have been digging through local archives wherever they could find them.

The Muskie Archives, the Lewiston Public Library, the Androscoggin Historical Society … wherever they could hunt down photos and information about Lisbon Street, this team went willingly.

They didn’t go about it halfheartedly, either, said Lewiston Mayor Carl Sheline, who owns the Munka Studio building.

“I visited the class when they were at the Androscoggin Historical Society,” Sheline said. “They were in a deep dive about all things Lewiston and thoroughly enjoying it.”

Smith, a man with a robust past in media design and production, said the project will continue in chapters, each highlighting a different segment of local history.

“The mills, the decline of Lisbon Street and now to this new energy,” Smith said. “To the uplifting and new.”

To get where they were going, Smith and his team worked closely with Darby Ray, a Bates professor and director of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships.

Ray said the most rewarding part of the project was seeing a connection made between the Bates students and the wider Lewiston-Auburn community.

“Our students live here for four years,” Ray said. “This is their home away from home, and this is a chance for them to be able to learn with some granularity about downtown Lewiston. They’re down here all the time, but they have no idea about the history. This was a chance for them to dive into the historical archives and to flex their research muscles.”

Putting all of that history into storytelling form, Ray said, may even help with economic development within the city.

“We have a lot of empty storefronts downtown,” she said. “We need ways to tell stories that will make people want to come and think about this place, to maybe inhabit some of these spaces and pay good money so that the downtown is ever more vital.”

The students who worked on the history as kind of an “Intro to Digital Media” final project described the extensive research required as daunting but fun.

One student was struck by a period in Lisbon Street’s history where bar owners were getting their liquor licenses pulled almost daily because of rowdiness at their establishments.

“It was a fun thing to read about,” he said.

The students say they don’t want to restrict themselves to periods in Lewiston’s history a hundred or more years back. They want to research more recent history, too — history that in 50 or 60 years, the inhabitants of that future Lewiston might want to look back on.

Thanks to the project, the images from Lisbon Street’s days of old will run on the side of Munka Studio, at 221 Lisbon St., around the clock. Anyone who happens to be walking or driving by will find themselves immersed in a history that pertains to the very street on which they tread.

Sheline, for one, is a fan of the project.

“Anytime people are excited about Lewiston,” he said, “I’m excited.”