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What if you could “go back in time” and visit Boyle Heights in the 1920s? What if you could hear the music and voices coming out of Zellman’s Men’s Wear or Ginsberg’s Vegetarian Café? What if you could follow the pathways of immigrant families who just landed in LA in 1900 to make a new life for themselves?
Through a partnership with the UCLA Library and Special Collections, the University of Southern California, and more than a dozen community archives, the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies is embarking on an ambitious, five-year initiative to create a multimedia, digital archive of Jewish LA. The archive will be accessed by an innovative web platform called “HyperCities” (http://www.hypercities.com) that will allow users to “drill down” at particular places throughout the city—for example, Pico-Robertson in the 1950s, or Boyle Heights in the 1920s—to uncover the traces and history of Jewish LA. The project will not only preserve the rich history of Jewish LA for generations to come, but will also make it accessible using cutting-edge digital technologies that will stimulate new research, teaching, and community engagement throughout Los Angeles and beyond.
One Neighborhood at a Time...Boyle Heights first appeared on the map as a neighborhood in 1884. As the heart of Jewish LA in the first decades of the 20th century, the neighborhood was a melting pot of many ethnicities, languages, and cultures: Russian and Polish Jews, Slavs, Greeks, Mexicans, Italians, and Japanese. It was considered by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, a Federal government organization charged with assessing real estate values, to be filled with “subversive racial elements,” and it was duly “redlined” in 1939. The demographics of the neighborhood changed dramatically after World War II, as freeways redefined the Los Angeles landscape, and new ethnic enclaves emerged, with Jews moving into the Pico-Robertson and Fairfax districts. What if you could go back in time and see the streets and photographs, hear the voices and languages, and enter the buildings to experience the vibrant neighborhood again?
The metropolis of Los Angeles is a massive global intersection of migration and immigration stories. Over the course of centuries, it has grown as a product of many migration streams: Uto-Aztecans two thousand years ago; Spanish in the late 18th century; Mexicans and Yankees in the 19th century; Chinese, European Jews, Japanese, South Americans, Italians, French, Filipinos, Koreans, and Russian Molokans by 1900. As the Los Angeles economy boomed and the Southern California image spread globally via Hollywood movies, television, and mass culture, the twentieth century saw the massive influx of immigrants from all corners of the globe. With the rise of Nazi Germany and in the aftermath of World War II, hundreds of thousands of Jews immigrated to the US, many eventually landing in Los Angeles to rebuild their lives. As Los Angeles grew into the global city that it is today, Jews from all walks of life played a critical and indispensable part of its cultural, social, and economic history. The great challenge for the American people in the 21st century is to represent and comprehend such a complex and diverse collective history. “Mapping Jewish LA” will help us appreciate, uncover, and learn from our history.
“Mapping Jewish LA” will be built on HyperCities, a software platform developed at UCLA that uses Google Maps and Google Earth but allows users to “go back in time.” HyperCities was founded by Todd Presner in 2007 and is currently co-directed by a faculty advisory committee consisting of Philip Ethington (History and Political Science, USC), Jan Reiff (History and Statistics, UCLA), Diane Favro (Architecture and Urban Design, UCLA), Chris Johanson (Classics and Digital Humanities, UCLA), and Mike Blockstein (Public Matters, Los Angeles). The platform has received support from a number of major grant agencies and companies, including the MacArthur Foundation (2008), the National Endowment for the Humanities (2009 and 2011), Google (2010), and the Haynes Foundation (2010). With this support, the basic technologies for the platform have been developed and a number of beta projects have been launched including:
• “The Los Angeles Citizen Research Collections”: http://hypercities.com/LA • “Visualizing Statues in the Antique Roman Forum”: http://inscriptions.etc.ucla.edu • “HyperCities Now” – Mapping Twitter Feeds from the Egyptian and Libyan Revolutions: http://now.hypercities.com
“Mapping Jewish LA” asks a series of seemingly straightforward—but deeply fraught and often contested—questions that are fundamental to American identity: Where are you
from? What used to be here? How can the past come alive? Given the vast diversity of the multiethnic metropolis of Los Angeles, the answers are far from simple or straightforward. As a platform that reaches deeply into archival collections and aggregates content across digital repositories, HyperCities transforms our knowledge of the past and the present, allowing new interactions across space and time. With the emergence of digital mapping technologies, the “real world” has become conjoined with cyberspace, rendering the city, with all its information networks, the classroom. The result is the bridging of expert knowledge and citizen knowledge, connecting generations and knowledge communities with university specialists.
Built on four-dimensional mapping technologies (3D space + time), visitors to the “Mapping Jewish LA” portal will be able to discover, explore, and even contribute to the history of Jewish LA. The portal will be accessible from any computer or mobile device connected to the Internet, which means that users can take “historical tours” through the city using mobile phones or delve into history from the quiet of home.
The technological platform will be open-source and modular, which means that any city—big and small—can easily develop content. The beauty of HyperCities is that every community can annotate its history, produce family genealogies through time and space, create oral histories, upload and download geo-referenced media items, build user groups, and curate content. City councils, government agencies, museums, religious institutions, adult learners, tourists, history buffs, and urban enthusiasts can use the platform to track real and virtual pathways through the city, accessing and contributing content while “on location.” The possibilities for taking education outside of the traditional classroom are endless: From real world social networking to virtual study abroad programs, global tourism, virtual museum exhibitions, and city celebrations.
“Mapping Jewish LA” will revolutionize the way we know the past, experience the present, and imagine the future. It uses digital technologies to make it truly possible to “travel back in time.”
Spearheaded by the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies and supported by the UCLA Humanities Division, the UCLA Program in Digital Humanities, and the UCLA Library, “Mapping Jewish LA” is a transformative research, teaching, and community engagement initiative. Nothing like it has ever been done before.
This $5 million project brings together tens of thousands of voices, photographs, archival materials, and special collections that document and map—through space and time—the complex history of Jewish LA from its beginnings to the present-day. With multiple partners across UCLA and the greater Los Angeles community, the project will create a uniquely interactive digital archive that will be used by students, teachers, government officials, community organizations, and the public-at-large for generations to come.
But the impact of “Mapping Jewish LA” will be felt far beyond the limits of our city. Indeed, this endeavor will revolutionize the traditional approach to outreach and education by bridging expert knowledge and the personal knowledge of citizens. With the ability to be replicated for any city—large or small—Mapping Jewish LA will forever change the way people from all parts of society experience, interact with, and know their world.
To launch this bold new initiative, an initial investment of $2 million is needed to develop and refine the platform, digitize initial holdings, secure the technical infrastructure necessary to support a project of this scope, and develop community outreach programs and teaching initiatives. Additional funds in the amount of $3 million will be needed to scale the project to include additional neighborhoods and cities, complete the digitization of archival collections, develop access on mobile devices, and maintain the infrastructure for the project in perpetuity.
About
Library
The UCLA Library, ranked among the top research libraries in the country, is a campus-wide network of libraries serving programs of study and research in many fields. Its collections encompass more than 8 million volumes as well as archives, audiovisual materials, corporatereports, government publications, microforms, technical reports and other scholarly resources. The UCLA Library also develops and provides access to an extensive collection of digital resources, including reference works, electronic journals and other full-text titles and images. Mapping Jewish Los Angeles will work closely with “Collecting Los Angeles,” which gathers, preserves, interprets and makes accessible UCLA Library collections documenting the remarkable multiplicity of cultures and at-risk hidden histories of the Los Angeles region.
Center for Jewish Studies
Us
The UCLA Center for Jewish Studies, founded in 1994, is the leading research center for the study of Jewish culture and civilization in California and one of the largest and most active centers in the world. Nearly 70 undergraduate and graduate courses are offered in Jewish studies each year, enrolling more than 2,000 students. The Center sponsors more than 50 lectures, conferences, and symposia annually. In addition, the Center supports civic engagement programs that open up the gates of the academy by addressing wide-ranging
policy, community, and social justice issues. In this way, the Center is actively preparing the next generation of leaders and encouraging real-world advances by marshalling the riches of Jewish thought, ethics, intellectual history, and culture.
Center for Jewish Studies
Box 951485Los Angeles, CA 90095-1485
Phone: 310.825.5387RSVP line: [email protected]
