0.16 Hypercities: a case study for the future of scholarly publishing  (Page 2/6)

Indeed, the development of the platform roughly parallels the development of Web 2.0: From relatively fixed, read-only portals and stand-alone applications for the display of content to participatory platforms that foster collaborative production across media environments through the repurposing of both content and software. The birth of Web 2.0 has been well articulated by such technology gurus as Tim O'Reilly as well as such leaders in the field of Digital Humanities as HASTAC co-founders Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg, both of whom are fierce advocates for "Humanities 2.0." Humanities 2.0 refers to generative Humanities, a humanistic practice anchored in creation, curation, collaboration, experimentation, and the multi-purposing or multi-channeling of humanistic knowledge. For more on Humanities 2.0, see: Cathy Davidson, "Humanities 2.0: Promise, Perils, Predictions," in: PMLA 123.3 (2008): 707-17; Cathy Davidson and David Theo Goldberg, The Future of Learning Institutions (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009). Digital Humanities 2.0 introduces new disciplinary paradigms, convergent fields, hybrid methodologies, and, perhaps most significantly for our purposes here, new publication media and models that are often not derived from or limited to print culture. It places a primacy on participatory scholarship, open-source models for sharing content and applications, iterative development, and interdisciplinary collaboration. In so doing, new communities—academic and the general public—are involved in the production of scholarship. This collaboration and interaction is at the heart of the HyperCities idea.

Developed using Google's Map and Earth APIs, research and teaching projects within HyperCities bring together the analytic tools of GIS, the geo-markup language KML, and traditional methods of humanistic inquiry. The central theme is geo-temporal analysis and argumentation, an endeavor that cuts across a multitude of disciplines and relies on new forms of visual, cartographic, and time/space-based narrative strategies. Just as the turning of the page carries the reader forward in a traditionally conceived academic monograph, so, too, the visual elements, spatial layouts, and kinetic guideposts guide the “reader” through the argument situated within a multi-dimensional, virtual cartographic space. HyperCities currently features rich content on ten world cities, including more than two hundred geo-referenced historical maps, hundreds of user-generated maps, and tens of thousands of curated collections and media objects created by users in the academy and general public.

As a Digital Humanities 2.0 project, HyperCities is a participatory platform featuring collections that pull together digital resources via network links from countless distributed databases. Far from a single container or meta-repository, HyperCities is the connective tissue for a multiplicity of digital mapping projects and archival resources that users curate, present, and publish. What they all have in common is geo-temporal argumentation. All content other than the historical base maps is stored in “Collections” (curated groupings of media objects and interpretive narratives) that are owned and controlled by their creators, but can be made “public” at will, viewed by other users, and edited (if the owner grants such privileges). Media objects can either be stored locally in HyperCities or linked though KML network feeds or web-services; they can, then, permissions permitting, be dragged and dropped from one collection into another user’s collection within HyperCities, making possible a rich sharing, recontextualization, and re-aggregation of digital materials. The original archival collections remain “intact” and the contributing archive can decide whether and how to expose its assets within the HyperCities framework. All collections are displayed in the “Intelli-list,” an intelligently populated list of collections and objects keyed to the spatial and temporal bounding coordinates selected by a user (as a user zooms out temporally or spatially, more collections come into view; as a user zooms in, fewer collections are shown). Collections can be nested (every HyperCities collection can hold one or more collections, ad infinitum ) so that a person or group of users can create a large and complex project all within a single “collection.” As intuitively as they use “folders” on any computer desktop, users can open and explore HyperCities Collections that have been made public by their creators. Creators of collections can also work collaboratively on curating projects within HyperCities. Users can add and view content down to the granularity of a minute and single point (for example, May 7, 2007, 6 AM at the northeast corner of MacArthur Park, Los Angeles) or up to a millennium and covering the geographic scope of the entire globe. User-generated content exists side-by-side with archival repositories, academic scholarship, research publications, and community media, allowing a rich cross-pollination between traditionally separated venues and voices. The beauty of HyperCities is that every community can annotate its history, produce family genealogies through time and space, create oral geo-histories, upload and download geo-referenced media items, build collections, animate historical maps, and curate content. Students, researchers, adult learners, tourists, history buffs, and urban enthusiasts can use the platform to track real and virtual pathways through a city, accessing and contributing content on personal computers as well as mobile devices.