 Welcome back to our closing plenary session for this spring's C&I membership meeting. I trust that you have all had a valuable meeting, had an opportunity to catch up with all the new colleagues to see some interesting things, to learn some new things. But I hope you have kept some mental cycles in reserve for what I think is going to be a mind-stretching closing talk this afternoon. Before we get there, I have just a couple of things on my list. A very short story I cannot resist telling. A couple of reminders and a couple of thank-yous. The very short story. Paul Peters and I shared a great admiration for the work of a science fiction writer named Daniel Keyes Moran. A few of you who have been involved with the Coalition for a long time may remember that Paul invited him to come and speak to us in 1995 in Washington D.C. at one of our meetings. And he gave a wonderful speech which included some readings from his next book. His next book hits some delays, but I'm delighted to say it was finally published and available on the Net as an e-book last week. And well worth the wait for those who enjoy his work. But that was a piece of closure that I just wanted to share with everybody who is interested. Reminders, in your packet you have a hold the date for our December meeting in 2011. That will be at the same hotel in Arlington, the Marriott that we had our December meeting in 2010 at. We have just completed arrangements and will imminently, if we've not done so already, be putting updates for the 2012 December meeting. That will be back in the District of Columbia proper at the Capitol Hilton. So I hope you will jot down both of those dates. We should be announcing dates for the Spring 2012 meeting in probably the next month and that will go out through C&I Announce. I also just want to note the International Digital Curation Meeting that the UK Digital Curation Center does every year. And we will again be very proud to be a co-sponsor of that. That meeting has had its date changed and is now set for December 5th through 7th in Bristol. And more information on that later through C&I Announce and the website. But if you've got that on your calendar you might want to just update those dates. Finally, I'd just like to thank all of the presenters who've been with us today and yesterday. We've had a very, very rich set of parallel sessions. I was able to drop into a number of them and I think the quality was just wonderful. And I'm, as always, profoundly grateful for the people who've made their time and expertise available to help all of us learn from their work and their insight. So I'd ask you to join me in a big hand for all of our presenters. I'd also like to thank the C&I team for making another meeting run so smoothly that it just seemed like it was all taking care of itself. That's an art and it's an art that I'm very grateful to have practitioners of working with us. Please join me in thanking them for making that happen. And now let me get on to the main event here. C&I has long had a deep interest in the way that technology is changing the humanities. The way it is enabling new kinds of insights, new kinds of communication, the understanding of new kinds of evidence, the way it is breaking down disciplinary barriers between individual humanistic disciplines. We've had a whole series of speakers over the years who have given us insights in the way things are developing there. Some of you may remember Bernie Frischer from a couple of years ago, or the presentation last year from Dan Cohen from George Mason University, or earlier some of the work that Greg Crane has talked about. Today we have another pioneer in the digital humanities who has combined a fascinating portfolio of technologies to really look at some intellectual questions that cut across many, many humanistic concerns. Todd Pressner is a professor at UCLA of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature. He also is the chair and leader of the Digital Humanities Program, which UCLA is making a pretty substantial commitment to. He told me that they have got 36 faculty involved in this, which really puts it at a scale comparable to anything I'm familiar with that's going on in the States, and is rolling out digital humanities majors and minors, which again is one of these really important steps because it begins to build a future cadre and shape the discipline. Todd has been working for some years on a system that he's going to tell us about today called HyperCities, which I hope you will find as fascinating as I find it. And I'm not going to try and describe it anymore because it's much better to see it and to hear Todd tell you about it. Please join me in welcoming Todd Pressner. Well, thank you so much for allowing me to speak with you this afternoon, and thank you for your fortitude the last couple of days. I'm really honored and humbled honestly to be able to present some of the work that we've been doing in the Digital Humanities to this audience, and also to bookend with my colleague Chris Borgman, who I've admired since coming to UCLA in 2001. And I want to thank C&I, Cliff, and Joan especially for your support. So I'm going to be presenting a project that really has in some ways paralleled I guess the past 11 or so years of the Digital Humanities called HyperCities. It's a project which has gone through a number of substantial iterations and transformations as new technologies have emerged and as new possibilities for asking and beginning to propose answers to vexing humanities questions, particularly humanities questions concerned with historical mapping, concerned with possible futures, and ideas that are rooted I think in core concerns of the humanities, complexity, ambiguity, contingency. And I think you'll see some of these projects today. I'll speak for about 45 minutes, and I'm going to speak initially from a PowerPoint, and then I'm going to go to a series of live different sites that HyperCities has been involved with. Because the connection is a slightly precarious, I decided I would use this backup to make sure that things actually do load. So we'll start with a German-Jewish philosopher, Walter Benjamin. He was born in Berlin in 1932 when the Nazis were coming to power. He fled to France and spent the last 12 years of his life working on a project of architectural history called the Arcades Project. It was a kind of montage-like history of Paris, particularly what he saw to be the capital of the 19th century. He called Paris the capital of modernity. He traced the streets, he traced the buildings, he traced the modes of dress, he traced the more rays of the period in Paris, and wrote extensively about the experience of trying to reconstruct a city through narrative means. He writes about the street. The street conducts the flanneur. This is the person walking through the street. The reference here to Edgar Allen Poe or Baudelaire poets and thinkers who experienced the great cities of modernity like London, Paris. It conducts the flanneur into a vanished time. For him, every street is precipitous. It leads downward into a path that can be all the more spellbinding because it's not his own. It's an extraordinary statement, I think, because it already gets us to one of the core concerns of HyperCities and really one of the core concerns in the digital humanities, which is historical knowledge, time, ideas about temporality, and ideas about spatiality, space. The street, after all, is a place that one walks down, but one doesn't walk down simply in a single time, as one might go diachronically, or sorry, synchronically, but rather one is able to go back in time. One goes down into a vanished time. It's precipitous. It leads downward. This idea is something, this idea of thinking about streets as layers or thinking about space as layers was an instrumental idea as I began to think about the HyperCities project. And it was actually in Berlin that I began to have my first experiences of trying to think through how one might, as a flanneur, be conducted downward in time. Back in 2001, I began to geo-reference maps manually. This is a torturous, arduous, and relatively silly process now, but nevertheless this is what we were doing. I wasn't familiar with GIS, and I had historical maps, and I thought this was a really interesting way to begin to think through layers of city spaces. But it was a little bit more complicated than just historical maps, because I thought, well, what if you could pinpoint, you know, my grandmother was born here in 1935, and then she moved here in 1937, and here in 1977, and here she lives in 2007. And one began to have a narrative, almost like a family genealogy that could be like a line, a polyline, that moved through time and space. And then I thought, well, wouldn't it be even more interesting if you could have many thousands of these stories? Imagine many different polylines moving through time and space, and that one could take an urban space as a model and actually core down sort of what archaeologists do when they go to the North Pole and they do coring down into the ice. You have 50,000 years of time, right, in an ice capsule. And I thought that's a really interesting model to begin to think about urban experience. What if one could take a street and say, you know what, I want this street, here's my bounding box, and I want 500 years. I want data about the street. It may be data about who lived there, census data perhaps. It may be data about stories. It may be family histories. It may be census data. It could be all sorts of information intersecting, and it would all be time, space specific. And so this was the origination of a project which I've been working on for the past 11 years with colleagues internationally in a number of fields from history to architecture history, urban planning, GIS, and archaeologists as well. It's a project that I think as you'll see the scope and the complexity, which a single person really can't possibly do because it requires the disciplinary methods of so many disciplines, not to mention the input of scholars and activists from all different walks of life. So hyper cities is actually a coinage that refers to the media theorist, Ted Nelson. Many of you probably know Ted Nelson's work because he coined the term hyper media and hyper text. Hyper cities is very much meant to be in that semantic lineage. A hyper text for Ted Nelson was a text that could not be reduced to a single medium because what was being presented, the data that was being presented, simply couldn't be represented in a single medium, particularly paper. The connections between the data points were too complicated. It was a nonlinear system. It was an ever recursive system that potentially built out in many different ways. And I thought what an interesting way to consider a hyper city. So rather than a city being a fixed geographical space with a fixed architecture or a kind of a kind of status, what if it was something that could be connected, so to speak, information networks could be connected to physical landscapes and they would interpenetrate in interesting ways that they would potentially open up and it would be open, participatory, people could tell family histories, could create video histories, could tag locations, could curate data, all about the city space that they knew and lived in. This would be an amazing project as well, at least out of my thinking, was because it was a project connected very fundamentally with humanities concerns, particularly concerns around historical memory and ideas of looking for traces of the vanished past. When I was in Berlin in 1995, this is shortly after the wall came down, there were many traces of the vanished past, not only of Jewish Berlin, but also the fact that there had been so many changes of regime that were in play and one saw these sort of open wounds in the architectural spaces of the present and how to make sense of them was really a very big challenge. There was no platform, there was no authoring platform that could help one to make sense of this complexity. Over the years, I mentioned we've collaborated with a number of folks, institutions from USC to the Center University of New York, to the Technical University in Berlin and to the University of Virginia and many other places, to develop a series of what could be called hyper cities, which are information networks connecting social media together with what's generally called GIS to illuminate aspects of the layered history, layered cultural and social histories of city spaces. If you go to Hypersities.com, this will take you to the main page here and that's the sort of starting point to see some of the projects that we've been working on. There's a Google project that you can see down there that we began working on which is to create rich maps for Google books. They have places mentioned in this book often for books that provides a kind of algorithmic mapping of places mentioned in books and we thought wouldn't it be interesting to feed it into our GIS server and actually have more historical information, historical maps and historical data that may actually illuminate one's reading of say the Great Gatsby or any other historical novel. In 2005, 2006, the idea for Hypersities began to change quite a bit with the emergence of social technologies and more participatory collaborative networks and you can see when I made this slide actually about five years ago phones looked like that and I show this partially because I think I wanted to indicate something about the history of this project. The history of this project was really a fundamental idea of linking time and space together, linking a temporal coordinate with a spatial coordinate or multiple temporal and spatial coordinates together so that one can move synchronically and diachronically. That it was connected to a physical space as much as an information space. We weren't able to do this with phones in 2005 and we're just starting to be able to do this now and I'll talk about a couple of the projects that we've taken into the urban space in Los Angeles to do historical mapping. So this was also a project that I think was trying to set a vision which would only be realized in the years to come. It was very much motivated by an idea that I thought you really couldn't have a view from above but you had to have a view from the ground. So this meant that there had to be some kind of openness built into the platform. Authoring tools, ways for people to create interoperable data that could be shared, that is exported outside of hyper cities and also imported into hyper cities. That was a critical part of the idea and we're still moving in this direction today where I imagine that there'll be constellations of hyper cities projects. People will be able to run their own instantiations of hyper cities working on local histories, community histories and be able to connect them together. So it would be truly a very distributed model for thinking about the urban historical landscape. This is still something that's to come. But I'm going to start by just giving a very brief background about some of the participatory projects within the field of what might be called neo-geography because this is really something that hyper cities has been very much in tuned with and for the digital humanities what this means is the creation of a lot of data, much of which I should say is quite complex and really raises I think some very fundamental questions about collection creation, collection curation, sustainability, preservation of data. Obviously the most well-known place for geospatial visualization and data is certainly Google Earth. All of us use this. Google Earth I think perhaps because of its ease of use as an application is something that I think has really in some ways opened up geo or geospatial thinking to audiences far beyond the academy. And this I think has been a very positive thing. We've tried to collaborate in our hyper cities with community partners because so much of the knowledge is community based. An example of I think a sophisticated project and I'm sorry for the blurry screenshot is the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's projects to document the crisis in Darfur. This is a screenshot from that project. So certainly you have things on one end of the spectrum like this and on the far other end of the spectrum perhaps you have the great Los Angeles cupcake map which is perhaps not as serious but yet if you want a cupcake it's very serious. But this is a map created in Google My Maps and easily exportable in what's now a standard KML and this standard is supported by the Open Geospatial Consortium and it's a standard that we use in hyper cities as well as the other standard for mapping which is WMS, the web mapping service, web mapping standard. Other kind of in between these two projects, George Mason had done a very interesting and I think fascinating project documenting stories from Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita. Again a kind of Google Maps mashup project that utilized a participatory dimension people tagging locations, adding pictures, video, stories, narratives in order to build out a more complex picture of what had happened and the stories around the event. Finally, let me mention a project called a digital Harlem which is done by a number of historians and this is a project which as you can begin to piece together as a Google Maps mashup as well but utilizes a sophisticated GIS database in order to unravel parts of the history of this relatively bounded spatial landscape. So Harlem 1920 to 1930 based on data that's been accumulated from a number of sources around crimes, events, churches, everyday history of Harlem and one has a number of map layers that can be placed on top of this in order to illuminate this history. So let me turn to hyper cities and tell you a little bit about this project and look at the interface and I'll tell you about some of the projects that we've been working on. I have to apologize for my cough. I've been sick for the past couple of days and so I have to feverishly drink water. So hyper cities is also a Google Maps Earth mashup. It's built on the Maps and Earth API and what we did was we introduced two I think very significant dimensions. One is a timeline at the top. The timeline allows you to zoom in and out of the past. So the granularity down to a second all the way up to a millennium is something that we support. And there's a series of cities. This is back in 2008. We had only a small number of cities, Berlin, LA, New York, IAANTI, Tombow and Peru, Rome and Tel Aviv as the main cities we were working on and since then we've grown substantially to have about 15 cities that are now quote unquote hyper cities. What this means is these are places where we have institutional collaborations with partners, whether they're institutions as libraries, colleges, they may be community organizations, they may be historical societies. In the case of New York, there's the New York Public Library which has a repository of maps which are capable of being fed into hyper cities and this is something we're working on even more so. And a series of classes, institutions that are working on building out parts of these cities. We use the open ID in terms of a login. So we allow people to use existing logins through Facebook or Google. We don't maintain that material. And what you have when you go into hyper cities are a series of maps and a series of collections. These collections can be public, they can be classes, they can be featured collections, they can be curated or they can be private. And what this means is that anyone can log in, anyone can begin to create materials about a city and curate content about that place. So if you were to look in Berlin and the general collection, an example we have about 40 historical maps. These are georectrified maps stretching back from 1237 when Berlin was founded, all the way up until 2009. And then of course the contemporary satellite data which is provided by Google. So what you're seeing here is a map of Berlin from 1772, georectrified and the root of the Berlin Wall. A couple of things that are interesting here. One, if the Berlin Wall was put up in 1772, what's interesting about Berlin is almost the entire city is in the east. That's because the city center which you can almost make out here was a fortified city. It was right around here. Very little of this is still maintained today. In fact it was mainly filled in over the years. But the river still runs through Berlin and as you can kind of see with the georectrification, it lines up quite nicely. HyperCities has about 250 historical maps available in 2D and 3D. Those are within the HyperCity system. And then the possibility of thousands of more maps through its interoperable web services. So basically for example the New York Public Library with a georectrified map set can feed data directly into HyperCities and we can properly display it. What you see in terms of the line there is just a tracing of the Berlin Wall that a user can then place on top of a map. And this begins to initiate this idea of layering. One can then place additional data. It can be as simple as, you know, my grandmother lived here where it can be a much more complicated story that may connect to some aspect of the history of that location. So in terms of curating projects, this is an example of a project that could be curated in HyperCities. And so what we have over here is a narrative view is what we call it. Where one keys particular aspects of the narrative to a location. The unique thing about HyperCities is that we wanted to create a system where the database returned objects as a function of time and place. And so the six parameters by which all the data is always organized in HyperCities is a start date and an end date. And of course you can have multiple, you can have it, it can be multiple start dates and multiple end dates especially if a building is built and destroyed and rebuilt and built again and so forth. And we also have a bounding box which is just a place, the four corners of a map. As you browse within HyperCities, it automatically returns data as a function of the area of the time span and the place span that you're looking at. This I thought was a fairly interesting way to think about how humanity's data could be retrieved. Instead of knowing precisely what you're looking for ahead of time as in doing a keyword search, I thought mainly the experience of experiencing a city, particularly a foreign city like a Flaneur, is really to be immersed in the city. You have to go there and look around, right? You have to discover things. You have to go down the wrong street. You have to get lost. And so very much the idea of HyperCities was you go to Berlin or you go to New York or perhaps a city you don't know and you look around. You have to browse by zooming in and out, by changing the time frame, by zooming in further or zooming out. You're going to get different data because the database is constantly returning data as a function of the time span and the place that you're looking at. Now, this is a curated collection of the history of Berlin Castle. And so the location is indicated there. There's a series of narrative and narrative objects. And each one is also connected to a particular view within HyperCities. I'll show you sort of how this works a little later because this allows us to create what I think are the basis of digital publications in a geotemporal visualization environment. This is a screenshot of a student project. We have now thousands of students who have used the platform at a number of universities from USC, UCLA, Occidental, the City University of New York, the University of Michigan, and the content they created is really often quite extraordinary. What the students do is they work in teams, at least in the class that I'm showing here, and they've created objects dealing with particular places in the city. In this case, this is the location of the Palace of the Republic, which is a 3D model which the students created sitting on top of a 1970 map of Berlin in the earth view, and then a series of photographs and narratives explaining what the location, the significance of this place is. And there's actually a series of layered collections. So what HyperCities allows you to do is to create layered collections, collections within collections within collections. And so you literally delve deeper as you explore the narrative features. And again, each part of the narrative is always connected with the particular viewing, the stage viewing, you might say, on the left. I'll show you a sort of building on that, is that we've been looking at embedding HyperCities and other websites over the past couple years with the idea that some of the collections that have been created in HyperCities are, I think, on par with what you might expect in any kind of academic journal or digital publication. And so we thought one of the things we like to do is to show publishers and also libraries what's possible in this kind of an environment. And particularly when it comes to the fact that you really can't print this article out and have the same kind of effect. As I say, the viewing environment, this geotemporal viewing environment is critical for the way the argument is made. So this is a project that we did with Diane Favreau and Gregor Callis, who's an art historian, classic scholar. And what he wanted to do was utilize models that were created by actually Bernie Frischer and Diane Favreau in the late 1990s for the Roman Forum. So these models were created not for HyperCities, but rather for an entirely different project. In fact, several years before HyperCities was even invented. These models were rescaled, put within Google Earth, and the idea was he wanted to add additional dimensions, particularly concerning statuary display and imperial processions through the Roman Forum. And so what you're seeing is the zoomed out version of the article, and then the article is on the right-hand side. As you move through the article, each section of the article is keyed to a particular location in the Roman Forum. And the models that he created, the statuary models and inscriptions are all part of the argument that he analyzes for what he calls a polemics of statue display. We wanted it to be recognizable to scholars in the field. That is to say, it had to have footnotes, had to have a bibliography, had to cite the methodologies and best practices of the discipline. And so this was something that you can click on the footnotes to get the references. But the argument itself, like the idea of a hypertext from Ted Nelson, cannot be reduced to a single medium. So I'm going to go to Los Angeles and talk to you. I really apologize for my voice, but I knew that I talked too much so I was going to lose it. I'll talk to you a couple of examples of what we've been doing in LA and to try to show you about how this platform relates to communities. This is the place where we've actually done the most work with community organizations in Los Angeles, particularly Historic Filipino Town, and the idea here of working with youth in LA's Historic Filipino Town to tell stories about their locations and their experiences. We've done this using Nokia tablets, where we've put historical maps from hyper cities and data that they created, curated, and allow people to take tours, essentially walking tours of the city space with stories that they themselves, the youth, have created. In hyper cities, they curated a number of projects utilizing historical maps, utilizing historical photographs. Some of these are actually coming from USC's photo archive that Todd Grapone had worked on a number of years ago, and others are coming from our historical map archives at UCLA. And so already, again, this idea of interoperability is very important because so many of these objects are connected with spatial dimension. The students investigated various aspects of the history of Historic Filipino Town, which is this area here. But what they found was the history of Filipinos in Los Angeles is actually a history that is not connected with that particular part of the city, but actually other parts around it. So these are locations of World War I registrants, Filipinos who served in the First World War. These are the boundaries today of Historic Filipino Town. And here's another example of a map that takes you to show a much broader part where Historic Filipino Town is just one component. But what you see is the way in which the whole Los Angeles region was carved up by the Mexican Rancho Land Grants that were made in the late 18th and early 19th century. So here you have a list of possible maps that one can overlay, historical maps. And again, one chooses collections on this side in order to connect them with particular maps. One of the things that we've tried to do as well, besides creating this open platform where students have put together video oral histories, flicker photo feeds, have conducted oral histories with elders in their community, is to also make it possible for people to look at scholarly vetted content, which is on the right-hand side here. This is Phil Effington's an initial version of his book, Ghost Metropolis, which is coming out this year, a history of Los Angeles over 13,000 years. The idea being that he thinks that one needs to investigate the long history of Los Angeles Basin and its many complex regional histories that were ruling this area. You have a scholarly article on the one side, but you have the ability to put additional material created by the community, created by the youth, in conversation. And so what this does is it already begins to create a new relationship between scholarly and community authorship. This is not something that Phil himself had planned, but rather as I was browsing his Ghost Metropolis, I thought wouldn't it be interesting if I could see what one of the youth from Historic Filipino Town were also saying about this region that he's talking about. And so a conversation, a digital kind of conversation, emerged in this particular juxtaposition, countless other examples of exactly this. So this is the examples of what the youth in Hi-Fi did, which is they created a series of guided tours of the land of the area of Historic Filipino Town following the trajectory of what they did were aggregated identities of particular people, a fountain pen boy, a Filipino service worker, and two others, with the ideas that one could follow in their footsteps, essentially, through the city space and understand something about that sort of absent or erased history. So this is the project which I'll conclude with, and then I'll show you some of the live social media projects, which won't require my voice as much, hopefully. The Los Angeles project has since moved into this almost launched platform on a kind of a collaborative mapping and visualization platform of LA with the idea of linking academic researchers, community organizations, and citizens together in authoring aspects of the history of Los Angeles. What we have on the left-hand side is a series of GIS data connected to census track over the past 50 years. Back in 1940, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 2000. And concerning education, occupation, residence, age, housing, population, marital status, and income. And we have hyper-studies embedded within this website with a series of featured collections concerning Los Angeles. And this is, again, with all the authoring tools and interoperability that hyper-studies have. So one could completely imagine this as an extensible thing. It's not, by any means, a finished thing. So one opens it up. The hi-fi collection on the right-hand side. What you have are a series of maps, a series of video histories told by, there's about 150 of them now, told by the youth, told by their parents, told by a series of community organizers and other leaders in the historic Filipino town area. And they talk about their neighborhood. They talk about their lives. They talk about the history of coming to Los Angeles. Almost all of them are first-generation. And how they understand their circumstances really begins to illuminate, again, talking about giving voice to this place. Now, this becomes particularly interesting when one connects it with the quantitative data, with the GIS. Because what you've had in the past is usually, again, a traditional kind of separation. On the one hand, you have hard data, right? The GIS data, often in maps that look like this one. But you often don't have them animated by the voices and the people who live there. And so the idea of this project was really to bring the quantitative and the qualitative together, to bring the storytelling and the data together in a common platform in order to enhance one another. So you can see exactly, you know, I'd like to say, you know, the last time the census was taken. And it turns out it's the lowest, between 0 and 35,000. So I'm beginning to think, okay, what if I did something else? What if I looked at median income trend over time? It's relatively stable. So this is over 1970 to 2000. So this is an area where you see very little change in income levels. Now, I thought, well, let's compare. Let's zoom out. Beverly Hills, Pacific Palisades, right? Drastic changes, right? So over time, these are the changes in income level compared to the relatively flatness of income level here. And I thought that's very interesting. Again, it kind of just shed some additional context for understanding these stories, for understanding this region. Even more. You can take, there's a map of the historic Filipino town underneath of there. This is the region. These are the video oral histories. And now we have, in 2000, high school versus college. The vast majority here, almost 75%, and this is by census track, often higher than 50%, or at least 50%, in almost the entire area around historical Filipino town of not having college education. It's interesting because so many of the students are talking about their own ambitions. They're talking about the idea of going to college. They're talking about their dreams and aspirations. They're talking about their 17, 18 years old. And if the data tells us anything, it tells us that more likely than not, they're not going to end up on college. And one sees this just by, again, bringing the GIS data together with these, with their own stories. It becomes a very powerful visualization and also politically, something that we've been using because we've been working with the councilman, Garcetti's office in Los Angeles, where historic Filipino town falls. In order for them to understand the significance of the region that he's the councilman number four. Then I thought, let's just put another piece of data on top because this is also kind of interesting. We have redlining data from LA. This is not done by us, rather it's done by Richard Marciano and David Goldberg, who run a project, a collaborative mapping project that looks at the history of redlining in the United States. Redlining, as you certainly know, was a practice, institutional practice of the United States by the Home Loan Corporation to decide where home loans should be made. Areas that were red were considered very dangerous. Let us just say very risky. Oftentimes the land was composed of immigrants. It was quote-unquote heterogeneous, heterogeneity was something that was frowned upon by the corporation. It's interesting that in 1930s this was considered a redlined area and we know this by just taking that map on. This is kind of the idea of the Los Angeles project. It began to open up, bringing together the data, the stories, animating the landscape in a way that would begin to be not just a source of knowledge but also a place of participation and kind of, I would say, awareness of the complex layers ever present in any historical landscape. So let me go ahead and end the PowerPoint and show you a couple of live examples provided this is still up and hopefully my voice will stay with us. So this is when you launch Hypersitties, this is what you have and I think I'm not going to go through this too much but what I do want to show you is a couple of social media projects which I think are pretty interesting. Let me go to Tehran and show you some other examples of projects that we've been working on and so what I'm doing here is we're in Tehran I don't have any historical maps of Tehran but we do have a featured collection that was created about Tehran and this is an example of the beginnings of a social media project that we've been working on for the past year or so with the election protests in 2009 and with the idea of what would it look like to make a kind of geotemporal documentation almost like a day-by-day account of those protests utilizing resources that were available through social media and this was a project that we supported it was done by a graduate student at UCLA by the name of Zareen Eskindar who is herself located in Los Angeles but from Tehran and what she did was she made a series of collections that go day-by-day often hour-by-hour documenting what happened in Tehran in 2009 gunshots heard streets blocked various sorts of things let me open show you what one of these look like so what happens is the maps load and center that for you and as you go through the collections here what you have are series of videos twitter feeds flicker and so forth that give you locations of where things were happening and it's done by time and so she has basically hand geocoded all of these locations as best she could there's about 1500 objects in this collection and we know the time she basically used her knowledge and collaborators in Tehran to figure out where these places were and she stuck them in locations and she did this day-by-day so often 3pm heavy security around this particular square video and it goes on and on and on and this is just a single day all the way through the evening including routes that were blocked and so forth so this particular day has maybe 15 youtube videos twitter feeds flicker as well as her own documentation about what happened and that's just a single day within this broader collection now this was an interesting first go I thought because for one thing it showed the way that social media was beginning to be used to document and foment revolution and of course as we know all too well in Tehran it was also used with a tremendous backlash the government used social media particularly flicker to find people and to jail them and so this became a very precarious project that raised a number of ethical questions about what it would mean to save and curate this kind of data particularly when the outcome is anything but secure these histories are the present is what I've been calling them more sort of hyper cities now if you went to now.hypersities.com it'll take you to a series of these new projects that look at social media and have this geographic presentation of the data this is a project that was done I mentioned by hand working with twitter feeds and flicker and youtube to automate a process insofar as we can retrieve location information and we have time information to visualize it on maps and then to archive that data and I'll show you the Egypt project because that is a good example of that actually I think maybe this is at Japan actually but it's also equally interesting so this is a project that we're calling hyper cities now and the idea is to take social media feeds primarily twitter in this case and we've been archiving them these feeds again based on a bounding box based on a time parameter so we decide okay with regard to the tsunami we started a little before March 11th the tsunami hit around it's March 11th at 245 in the afternoon in Japan and you have very few actually twitter feeds but you have a number but what's interesting if you go to these feeds because we've archived them you can play them you can watch them unfold and in the case of Japan it's of course an unmitigated tragedy profoundly disturbing but at the same time a record of events through social media and one which can be analyzed for a number of I think possible outcomes that could be useful particularly concerning crisis management disaster relief even getting information out not to mention a record so to speak of those events let me go to the Egypt one we have about let's say a hyper city you see a couple of changes we utilized the simile time bar for Egypt and this we stopped archiving because we simply have too much stuff but if you were to go say to February 11th which is the day Mubarak resigned and even to go to the speech we have almost 10,000 tweets around 6pm which is when he delivered his resignation speech and these are grabbed from location parameters in twitter some of them have latitude and longitude if they were put up on a phone that had that others have various levels of granularity with regard to the location of the tweeter one thing we are sensitive to and something that I think again goes to that ethical question about this kind of data we ambiguated latitude and longitude when it returned 9 decimal places to us which actually gave you the exact location of the tweeting we only displayed down to 2 decimal places with the idea that a 1 kilometer radius might be a safe distance so to speak in terms if this data was ever harnessed by people that wanted to track down who was saying what against the government this is a question that I would be more than happy and interested to discuss because it raises huge issues I mean this data is public let us say it is made open and users commit to certain agreements when they create this data and decide how much they want to reveal about their location and identity and so forth and one of the things that we are doing is basically streaming it live as well as archiving it and allowing people to go back and play those at that play or see that archived data so this is February 11th, 2011 basically as it plays it goes up on a map we have what I found interesting in Egypt is about half as an Arabic half as an English which also may indicate something about the population who is tweeting in the case of Japan almost 99% is in Japanese and we have a Google translator there to view that data but this is what we are trying to imagine here is how we can connect say social media feeds like Twitter like Facebook, YouTube with the historical data, the rich GIS data, the stories, the narratives the long historical past and the idea is to bring these two projects together so hyper cities being a project about historical time layers and then projects like this which utilize social media as also opening up participation opening up the public sphere in a way that is really I think very substantial very radical and potentially down the road it is very important for the way historians and cultural historians understand these processes and the role that social media played in our information landscape of the present so this is I guess I will end with this project which is only a couple months old and is one that raises some really interesting questions for archiving and also ethics concerning this data to give you just an understanding of how much data we are talking about with regard to Japan there is about 650,000 tweets that are specific to the Sendai region that we have archived, Egypt it is about 500,000 and Libya it is just Libya.hypersities.com it is about 300,000 and so I am also imagining something we are working with our library at UCLA, special collections to do is to consider this data as a special collection, something that should be kept by the library and in the context of these events certainly it is important material that can then be data mined visualized, analyzed in ways that I think we at this point have only begun to think about so why don't I in there and it looks like my voice has come back a little bit so I am really happy thank you for your patience and I am happy to take questions and show you some of the other collections live within Hypersities I think it looks like the web is working pretty well so I can do that so thank you Hi, I just wondering if you can talk a little bit more about engaging your communities because obviously it would be fantastic to have more of this going on in contextualizing information via space time but of course I think probably some of your real success has been maybe engaging the communities around these things Sure, well perhaps the most persistent connection with the community has really been in the Los Angeles area and it is I think the sort of flagship project that we have done is the one that I mentioned in my historic Filipino town and the collaboration with Councilman Eric Garcetti's office one of the things we are doing with this project once this is the live version of the project once we are done with it at the end of the month and this has been supported by the Haines Foundation which supports research on LA is to make this available more broadly to community organizations and not only because the data is for the entire county of Los Angeles but also the offering tools are already extent so that other community organizations non-profits, museums what have you can make use of these tools in order to create collections about their own areas. This is something which is really at the heart of the project is really again a single person can't possibly even a group of small group of people can't possibly create the range of collections that need to be made the data over here is primarily put together by Phil Lathington at USC and some of his collaborators there and that data will be I think tremendously useful as you begin again to kind of connect it with the qualitative storytelling aspects we're in conversations with a number of libraries and other institutions particularly the New York public library where we have a number of maps that stream directly from their map servers and also have done quite a number of tests with folks at the University of Virginia to bring together some of their GIS data into hyper cities and also to push our data into some of their systems so this is in many ways this idea of building hyper cities as a kind of web service is something that is also relatively new that is to say even four or five years ago this was not the way that we had imagined the project and over time it's changed as both the technologies as well as the possible collaborations with community members have expanded so this I think would be the best example that I can show you the Hi-Fi project I think it's pretty interesting the redlining project is another one we have a limited screen space here so I'm going to have to kind of like do a sort of half and half thing so you can sort of see it yeah so this Hi-Fi collection is the one that we created and it's primarily by the Filipino Workers Center it's by a group of artists and media activists associated with a group called Public Matters and it's a collaboration with USC and UCLA as the two institutional partners and so when you open up these personal stories as I had showed you a couple these are all caregiver stories of particular families stories by particular youth these are oral video histories stories of particular veterans family histories and really extraordinary trove of resources that shed I think a light that I think these will take a second to load because they're all coming from the mail but they'll load there you go and they're some of them are really quite moving this is one of our interns and his American dream I think this is an odd My name is Angelio Bernardo I'm 19 years old My nickname is Manok when I was I think in the 5th grade or 6th grade I used to own a firing rooster and since then I began drawing chickens and playing with it when I was 13 we came here to Los Angeles in historic Filipino town for vacation we spent here I think 2 months back in the Philippines in any case you can explore these in a lot of detail and each one provides an angle of analysis and insight into the granular specificity of building by building and location by location and really time slice by time slice these projects seem really extraordinarily well connected the different pieces and the different media it's really wonderful I'm curious how this kind of material can be cited at a level of granularity I can imagine somebody writing about Berlin or writing about Los Angeles might want to hone in on a specific place or specific region how do you support that just like that you click on link and it gives you a link which will take you directly to that view that you're looking at so there is of course you can cite a number of things you can cite the title and the creator but this permalink exists for every level of every collection and so you can be at the in this case I'm at a sub-collection of a collection and so I'm within high-fi youth rather than within high-fi the broader collection and so the permalink is different and so this would be the what you would use to take you back directly to that collection anytime and that would be the citation that you would use with regard to maps for example you can export in XML all the metadata about the maps and you can also create a permalink to any view within hyper cities that you can embed in another website that's a really useful feature too if you're in fact you've gone through hyper cities and you know I want this particular view of New York looking down to a single in 1950 and that's essentially a snapshot that then you can embed in another website so those are I guess the main ways that all objects have permalinks all collections have permalinks and all map data has metadata which is exportable that can be cited as you go forward accumulating this mass of different types of data tweets video information do you have any observations speculations about the task of managing curating the accumulating stuff that you've got to make all this happen and how that's going to go forward over like 10 years or more this is perhaps the biggest challenge of a project like this insofar as you're building a platform and you've created offering tools the mass of data is going tremendously and there's all kinds of different sorts of data and some of it is housed locally other is in repositories who knows where some of it's fed into hyper cities some of it breaks an example of this is the Tehran project that I showed you earlier where we didn't archive any of the social media stuff everything was a link to YouTube or Flickr or Twitter pics and what we know is that more than 20 or 30% of the YouTube videos have since been taken down and so when you click on them it's a video no longer available there might be lots of reasons for this it might be that the person who created it has realized that there might be in danger and they want to get rid of it but with regard to the fact that much of this is on external repositories it does create this problem of the fragility of the interlinks between the data and whether the entire thing both the links the network links themselves as well as the things that they're linked to should be archived and that's something that we haven't done yet what we've been doing is we archive network links the whole idea of the project was to basically help to host network links to various sorts of data repositories whether it's GIS whether it's photo repositories what have you but it of course raises that very big question about well who's going to guarantee that it's going to continue to work who's going to oversee it who's going to preserve it who's going to evaluate it and within the hyper cities itself there's tiered levels and that's I think important that is to say on the lowest level there's a kind of anything goes idea which is public collections anyone can log in they can create one and it becomes public some stuff is really interesting other stuff is not so good and that's the nature of an open platform we also have we have an authoring we have a collaborative a collection a group of professors we'll work with people who are authoring collections and kind of if they want that collection that they're creating to be quote-unquote featured or published or if they want to in fact take hyper cities and embed it in their own website we'll work with those teams and the idea being that they have the authority and are really responsible for the content that they're creating and ideally you know they have the they have the credentials to evaluate the stuff they're making that's definitely the case with regards to the LA project I mean the stuff is all been curated embedded it's not the anything goes model but then somewhere in between we have classes and classes are interesting because they're the professor or the person you know TA, whomever can assign privileges to people to be able to add or access or delete material they can allow their class to do that but not other people they can decide if it's public or private if it's visible or invisible so a lot of the classes within hyper cities are actually not visible because for obvious reasons maybe the professors or the students don't want their material public some do, which is great there's a lot of interesting material created by the students but not all of it's not all of it's public one other way is that we work with our course management system at UCLA, hyper cities is a tool that works with Moodle and so an instructor students and instructor would log in through Moodle and then only see the material for their class they're not thrown into the general hyper cities environment where they see everything and so it's another way of filtering and curating the experience that the students have with the idea that the professor is in charge of week by week what the students would see and the students have certain access privileges for what they can and can't do they can't delete the professors things but they can delete their own things can't delete their classmates things which is so if you wanted to learn more about it I would just go to the main site at Hypersities.com which is just this is where you would launch Hypersities and all the collections that I mentioned today the Egypt collections the the Bowman Forum collection some of the other information about the Tehran project and the Hi-Fi project and things we've done here is actually quite a bit of information about sort of education, research, publications and how to we're feverishly producing more how to's so that people can learn to use the platform and with some ease it does have a learning curve and it's something that both for professors and community organizations it's easy enough to view things but if you're actively involved in the curation and creation of content certainly the learning curve is a little bit more steep and so we've tried to have some guides for how to get started and also an active help forum to guide users so all the information is at there at Hypersities.com well thank you thanks for an amazing whirlwind tour and I have a feeling a number of us are going to be off to Hypersities.com to explore this in more detail ourselves please join me again in thanking Todd for a fantastic presentation he's given us a lot to think about here as we travel on home and let me wish you all safe travels and if I don't see you before I look forward to seeing many many of you in December bye bye