Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} On Tuesday, January 24, Todd Presner (Duke '94), gave a presentation at Duke entitled “Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities: From Berlin to Los Angeles and Beyond.” The presentation was generously funded by Duke’s Center for Jewish Studies and the German Studies Department. In a visually stunning lecture, Presner, Professor of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature at UCLA, where he is the Director of UCLA’s Center for Jewish Studies and Chair of the Digital Humanities Program introduced his award-winning “HyperCities” project (http://hypercities.com), a digital mapping platform that allows students and scholars to “go back in time.” Presner showed multiple applications being developed in a number of cities and countries (L.A., Japan, Egypt and Libya just to name a few) that the HyperCities project is engaged with, but particularly focused on the mapping project in Berlin to demonstrate the way in which HyperCities can be utilized as a teaching tool to investigate the humanities.
Going through the user-friendly platform, Presner showed how maps of Berlin could be superimposed upon one another – maps from a multitude of time periods, as well as from various map-makers. Looking at these maps, the user can see not only the way that cities may have changed over time (and the ways in which participants move through and perceive space), but also the subjective nature of map-making. Maps are generally biased, as Presner illustrated in looking at old maps of the GDR which showed communist East Berlin as being the much larger of the bi-furcated Berlin urban area. Even non-subjective maps are often “incorrect” – as map-making itself is such a subjective project, both imposing on and reflecting the way we move in space, as well as the ways in which space is perceived by us, and by the various cultures we live in. To that end, the HyperCities project is also engaged in what Presner called “geo-rectifying” space – re-examining where things are, or where they were, actually located in both time and space. As both Presner and several of the attendees in the lecture then noted, this begs the question of what is “normative” for a map. In looking at the emplotment of both peoples and places within spatial narratives, maps often function much as texts do, which is what Presner is looking to bring out in his digital humanities project. As Presner showed synagogues that were previously marked on maps of Berlin, and then suddenly absent, the question is raised of what it means for space to be absent. What does it mean when space is marked, and then unmarked? Who makes those decisions? What do they reflect about the society or culture in which those decisions are made? Presner demonstrated several student projects by freshman at UCLA that explored many of these questions utilizing the HyperCities project.
Presner went on to show how the HyperCities project forces the user to look at questions of mediation of space, as well as issues of memory – and the politics of memory. With HyperCities, Presner demonstrated that the ways in which history is perceived, and written, is often based upon what information is able to surface. HyperCities was able to track this in the recent Arab Spring uprisings, in which social networking changed the ways in which we perceived what was taking place. While certain outlets of historical investigation and reporting may have been silenced, individuals were able to reach out on a scale never-before seen, and then tracked to very specific locations.
As HyperCities continues to engage in new projects, new questions and dilemmas are brought to the surface. Presner demonstrated the Visualizing Statues” project that HyperCities has been recently been engaged with, a project that attempts to reconstruct the landscape of the Roman Forum, and the issues raised by ritual usage of public space in antiquity. As the audience watched the demonstration, Art History graduate student Elizabeth Baltes raised the issue of the lack of detail of (and on) the statues themselves – noting that the accurate depiction of such statues, as well as the inscriptions on them, are critical in any thorough evaluation of spatial usage.
Presner’s lecture will be available online in a few weeks, please be sure to check back soon.
Center for Jewish Studies