Exploring the Field Guide
One way to browse the material collected here is to follow the path laid out on the main page, which will take the virtual traveler from the Carpinteria Tar Pits up the 101 to Refugio State Beach, with stops along the way at Summerland, the Santa Barbara Harbor, and Coal Oil Point. On this path, you will find observational and historical descriptions and contemporary and archival images of each site.
Another way to navigate this material is by keyword. These interpretive routes are organized by thematic groupings like memory, ecology, and labor. The keywords forge connections between sites, histories, and perspectives that push against geographical and historical boundaries.
One of the most common experiences of oil in Santa Barbara County is the sight of offshore oil platforms on the horizon, but vision is not the only sense through which one encounters oil in this place. As many of the graduate students discovered during their research, one might also experience oil through the senses of sound, smell, touch, and taste. For this reason, we have organized the material gathered here into a sensory archive that can be explored via each of the five senses.
Yet another way to venture through the Field Guide is by doing keyword searches yourself, thus creating your own paths. The search function accesses the metadata for each item. Titles, dates of publication, and location are all potential search terms.
We hope that by providing many routes through this material, we allow virtual travelers to make unexpected discoveries, both along the paths we have created and the ones they discover.