Digitizing cultural stories and histories
By molly montgomery
May 24, 2011 1:23 a.m.
Two UCLA students mapped the lives of Holocaust survivors and put their results online. Their project follows the lives of a married couple who traveled from Europe to Israel and eventually to the United States. A viewer can zoom around the globe, following the couple’s journey and reading their story.
This was just one of the projects funded by the W.M. Keck Digital Cultural Mapping Program showcased at the Faculty Center on Monday.
Digital Cultural Mapping is a new practice of using technology such as Google Earth, Geographic Information Systems and 3-D modeling to illustrate research in the humanities and social sciences in a spatial way, said Elaine Sullivan, the project coordinator and a postdoctoral fellow in Near Eastern languages and cultures.
The three-year program, funded by the W.M. Keck Foundation, provided $500,000 in grants to develop projects using this technology, Sullivan said. Since it is the last year of the program, students with the best projects were asked to present their research to the public, she said.
Patrick Tran and Andy Trang became involved in digital cultural mapping through a Fiat Lux seminar, Bearing Witness, in which they met Holocaust survivors and listened to their life stories. There, they met the couple whom they ended up profiling for their project.
To carry out the project, Tran and Trang, who are both fourth-year physiological science students, used Hypercities, which Trang described as “a beefed up version of Google Earth.” They pinpointed the locations of specific events in the survivors’ lives and combined maps with photographs and text.
“We can tell their story representing them geographically, temporally and spatially,” Tran said.
Another project by Amelia Wong, Diane Thepkhounphithack and Krisztina Jozsef merged modern and ancient techniques for communication. The three graduate students in architecture originally wrote a paper on the emergence of marketing. They examined graffiti on the walls of the ancient Roman city Pompeii, Wong said.
Then they began to notice how similar the Pompeiian messages were to modern day advertisements and status updates. They decided to compare the old to the new through graphics, allowing them to present their research in a more relevant way, she said.
The group took their project even further, creating a Facebook page for an Ancient Roman, Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, who had lived in Pompeii. The three students and their friends had fun posting status updates and messages onto Gaius’ wall. They also uploaded pictures of the ruins of Pompeii, Wong said.
At the student showcase, Willeke Wendrich, a professor in Egyptian archaelogy, gave out prizes to the best undergraduate projects. Guowei Zhang won first place for his project, “Exploring Deconstructivism,” which displayed the economic effects that the Guggenheim Museum had upon the city of Bilbao, Spain. Tran and Trang took second place for their Holocaust project, and Kevin Lloyd won third place for his project modeling the Circus Maximus in Rome.
