A Field Guide to Oil in Santa Barbara

Exploring the Field Guide

A Field Guide to Oil in Santa Barbara is a web archive and map that contains items gathered and created by the graduate students of the Fall 2018 Mellon Sawyer Seminar at UCSB over the course of their site-based research on the history of oil in Santa Barbara County. Due to the number and variety of items, which include images, archival documents, audio files, and textual descriptions, the Field Guide is designed to be explored through a number of routes.

One way to browse the material collected here is to follow the path laid out on the map 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. Along 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 using the visualization tool, which you can access by hovering over the compass icon at the top left of every page. Yet another way to venture through the Field Guide is by using the search function (click the magnifying glass at the top of any page)  to do keyword searches, thus creating your own paths. The search function accesses the metadata for each item. Titles, dates of publication, and locations are all potential search terms.

We hope that by providing many routes through this material, we allow virtual travelers to make unexpected discoveries.

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