0.5 Digital humanities 2.0: a report on knowledge  (Page 7/10)

As a Digital Humanities 2.0 project, HyperCities is a participatory platform that features 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. For example, the digital curation project “2009-10 Election Protests in Iran” (see Fig. 3) meticulously documents, often minute-by-minute and block-by-block, the sites where protests emerged in the streets of Tehran and other cities following the elections in mid-June. With more than one thousand media objects (primarily geo-referenced YouTube videos, Twitter feeds, and Flickr photographs), the project is possibly the largest single digital collection to trace the history of the protests and their violent suppression. It is a digital curation project that adds significant value to these individual and dispersed media objects by bringing them together in an intuitive, cumulative and open-ended geo-temporal environment that fosters analytic comparisons through diachronic and synchronic presentations of spatialized data. In addition to organizing, presenting, and analyzing the media objects, the creator of the project, Xarene Eskandar, is also working on qualitative analyses of the data (such as mappings of anxiety and shame) as well as investigating how media slogans used in the protests were aimed at many different audiences, especially Western ones.

Election protests in iran

YouTube video on this collection: (External Link)

Permalink to this collection in HyperCities: (External Link)

Another project, “Ghost Metropolis” by Philip Ethington (see Fig. 4), is a digital companion to his forthcoming book on the history of Los Angeles, which starts in 13,000 BCE and extends through the present. Ethington demonstrates how history, experienced with complex visual and cartographic layers, “takes” and “makes” place, transforming the urban, cultural, and social environment as various “regional regimes” leave their impression on the landscape of the global city of Los Angeles. The scholarship of this project can be fully appreciated only in a hypermedia environment that allows a user to move seamlessly between global and local history, overlaying datasets, narratives, cartographies, and other visual assets in a richly interactive space. Significantly, this project—a scholarly publication in its own right—can be viewed side-by-side with and even “on top of” other projects that address cultural and social aspects of the same layered landscape, such as the video documentaries created in 2008-09 by immigrant youth living in Los Angeles' historic Filipinotown. The beauty of this approach is that scholarly research intersects with and is enhanced by community memories and archiving projects that tend, at least traditionally, to exist in isolation from one another.