Touring LA, one of a suite of courses designed for the Keck DCMP and now offered as a digital humanities minor elective, is also part of another innovative UCLA instructional initiative: the freshmen clusters.
These cluster classes provide first-year students with an opportunity to take a yearlong course sequence on a focused topic delivered from an interdisciplinary perspective. In the first two quarters, cluster courses rely on the lecture/discussion section format familiar to many introductory courses. What is most distinctive about them is that they are team-taught by faculty from up to four different disciplines who approach the topic—
ranging from the cosmos, to sexuality, to myth, to the 1960s—from their
7 This echoes the findings of Mahony and Pierazzo, “Teaching Skills or Teaching Methodology?”
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own perspectives while engaging in interdisciplinary conversations with their colleagues. In the third quarter, students have the opportunity to select a topical seminar taught by one of the teaching team members (made up of lecturers and teaching fellows) from the previous two quarters.
These seminars allow most students to choose a topic and methodology of some particular interest to them as well as create a substantial piece of scholarship that rests on the background knowledge gained in the first two quarters. Touring LA was part of GE66: LA—The Cluster, a class designed to introduce students to the complexities of urban environments through the prism of Los Angeles, the students’ home for (at least) the next four years.
Throughout the first two quarters, students engaged with the spaces of Los Angeles from a variety of perspectives. Lectures and readings challenged students to consider them from historical, literary, sociological and legal perspectives. They were introduced to the imagined spaces of city boosters, realtors and novelists, and they researched particular geographic communities for their writing assignments. In the first of these assignments, they wrote a history of a neighborhood or community in Los Angeles County. For the second, they conducted an ethnographic interview of someone who lived or worked in that community and subsequently wrote up their findings. Their last assignment took the form of a letter written to the appropriate government official, in which they documented a problem currently facing that community and suggested a solution. Students began their spring quarter seminar, Touring LA, having surveyed the city of Los Angeles and having developed a rudimentary range of tools for performing city-based research.
Students also received a brief introduction to the importance of tourism for Los Angeles—for bringing prospective residents to Southern California and for bringing tourist dollars and jobs into the economy. These themes were more fully developed throughout the seminar. They read about urban and heritage tourism. They debated whether a tourist bubble really existed in Los Angeles and then unintentionally proved that it did when they began plotting places they wanted to visit on a class-created online map. They were even more surprised when their sites corresponded with the places German and French guidebooks suggested visitors see in Los Angeles.
By the quarter’s end, class members had a good sense of the importance of tourism for cities more generally and for Los Angeles in particular.
The largest part of their effort during the quarter—and of particular interest for this chapter—was to prepare their own interpretive tour of
5. Teaching Digital Humanities through Digital Cultural Mapping 129 Los Angeles. The requirements for creating the individual tours were fairly simple, although the challenge for the students was substantial. First, the tour had to introduce its proposed audience to Los Angeles from a perspective it would not have had otherwise. Second, the tour itself had to include at least ten physical locations in Los Angeles and vicinity. Third, it had to be presented in two formats: a written document equivalent to a tour guide and a digital version, done either in a commercial online mapping program or in the HyperCities platform (http://www.hypercities.com/). The tour itself could be historical or contemporary. In the digital environment, it could be richly illustrated with images, sound or video. What ultimately would determine the success of their individual tours would be the interpretive argument they were making about Los Angeles as they led their tourists through their introductions, the individual sites, and the descriptions that accompanied them.
The assignment was not as simple as it might seem. Students had to do substantial research in order to construct their narratives and to find locations that best reflected and sustained it. The first two quarters’
research had provided them with many potential ideas for tours, but not all of them were well suited for a geographic presentation. Nor did all of those possibilities have what the tourism-savvy students recognized as tourist appeal. That was of some concern to them because their classmates served as critics of their tours at three different times during the quarter:
when they first proposed the topic of the tour, after they identified the first five locations, and when the tour was completed. Being freshmen, few had access to cars, making it difficult to visit many of their sites (while enhancing the practical value of the “street view” function in digital mapping platforms).
In the two years this course has been offered (and taught by Janice Reiff, a historian), the students have designed a wide range of fascinating and diverse tours on topics that have shed interesting perspectives on Los Angeles (see Figure 1). One student created an “insider’s guide” to ethnic restaurants in Los Angeles, documenting eateries frequented by neighborhood residents but unknown to trendy Angelenos. Along with good eating tips, her “tourists” also learned about many of the city’s newest immigrants and the neighborhoods in which they lived. Another student provided a surfer’s guide to LA: starting out as simple list of where to surf, the final tour—displayed atop satellite imagery so the visitor could actually see the waves—offered a history of Southern California surfing and surf sites, emphasizing their own distinctive characteristics
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and characters. Still another investigated and mapped institutional continuities and changes in South Los Angeles as neighborhoods changed from being predominantly African American to Latino.
Figure 1. Tours created by students in the 2008 offering of Touring LA.
Although more deserve highlighting, three stand out. One student had, before she enrolled in the class, developed an interest in Howard Hughes after watching the film, The Aviator (2004). Reading his biography, she decided that Hughes’ life story could reveal much about the city so she created her Howard Hughes Tour of LA (Figure 2). It began as Hughes moved, like many Angelenos, from Texas to Los Angeles to seek his fortune. It explored the film, oil, and aerospace industries as well as the spaces Hughes frequented before becoming a recluse in Las Vegas, a site she also pulled into her LA story.
Figure 2. Howard Hughes Tour of LA.
5. Teaching Digital Humanities through Digital Cultural Mapping 131 Another began life as a shopper’s guide to Los Angeles but ended as a fascinating presentation on the garment industry. The tour, naturally, ended on Rodeo Drive and Melrose Avenue, but it began in the sweatshops and factories of a very different Los Angeles and moved through union halls and the fashion district before arriving at the high-end retail and resale shops. The act of following the tour documented one of Los Angeles’ largest industries. The single most ambitious project used the tour/map format to engage with the contention of the LA School of urban scholars that their theories about Los Angeles—the archetype for the post-modern American city—had also supplanted the old models of urban theory developed by the Chicago School some seven decades earlier when Chicago seemed to be the archetypal city. Spanning the vast spaces of the Los Angeles metropolitan region, the tour showed that Los Angeles with its historical layers reflected elements of both.
As they completed their projects, the students easily mastered the basics of online mapping and, by necessity, developed basic skills in markup languages, and in transferring their digital maps into social mapping platforms where they could take advantage of historical map overlays to illustrate their points about change over time.8 They struggled with many of the issues cartographers must address when creating maps that are analytical and narrative as well as simply representational. They mined the photo collections at UCLA, the Los Angeles Public Library, the California Digital Library’s Calisphere (http://www.calisphere.universityofcalifornia.
edu/), the University of Southern California Library, the Library of Congress, and other places to make their virtual tours richer.
The final learning experience for both classes came on the last day of the quarter. On that day, the students climbed on a bus for a live tour of the sites they, as a group, decided were the most interesting to visit. Both classes had ambitious agendas: a 57-mile trip that took them from Watts Towers to Hollywood, from Leimert Park to Silver Lake, from Angel’s Flight to Pink’s Hotdogs. The second tour was affected by what at least two students had built into their virtual tours—LA traffic. The rain that day cut the planned tour almost in half and introduced students to new, uncharted neighborhoods as the bus driver sought alternatives to the
8 Many developed skills in HTML and KML, and the process required students to geo-reference imagery and add it to platforms such as HyperCities. An undercurrent of our program’s focus is to balance the use of experimental projects with that of software and standards supported by academia and industry. As evidenced by the use of KML for geospatial markup, we sometimes use the more widely adopted standard in preference to the more robust.
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clogged freeways. Fortunately, they also retained the virtual versions to visit the sites at their leisure during their remaining years at UCLA.