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USC Libraries Board of Councilers' Ahmanson Lab Project Spotlight

Scalar

Every semester the Ahmanson Lab supports faculty to integrate digital exhibits or multimedia research projects into their USC courses using Scalar. Priority is given to projects that make use of USC Libraries’ Digital Collections, offering students imaginative ways to engage, analyze or visualize primary materials.

Successful applicants receive robust support from the Ahmanson Lab. Dedicated Lab personnel are assigned to each course to train students and/or faculty in Scalar and to provide semester-long support with project design, development, and implementation.

Since 2020, the Ahmanson Lab has created sites for and with over 25 courses. We've partnered with our colleagues at USC Libraries to create an additional 20 collections-based Scalar projects.

Scalar is an open source authoring and publishing platform, supported by USC Libraries, Dornsife, and the School of Cinematic Arts, and used by faculty and students in college and university courses worldwide to create born-digital, media-rich research projects and exhibitions.

Form and Power: Black Murals in Los Angeles (Spring 2021)

Form and Power: Black Murals in Los Angeles is an online exhibition that uses digital images from USC’s Robin Dunitz Slides of Los Angeles Murals, 1925-2002 collection to explore African American muralism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The installation presents artifact labels alongside short thematic essays that examine the role of Black murals in community-building, political movements, and illustrating Black histories. Form and Power pays particular attention to the ways aesthetics have been a powerful source of Black pride in Los Angeles muralism, historically and today.

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The exhibition was collectively curated by Dr. Ellen Macfarlane and the freshman students enrolled in Form and Power in African American Art (GESM 110g) during the Spring 2021 semester at USC.

A History of Photography in USC Libraries Collections (Fall 2020)

A History of Photography in USC Libraries Collections is a digital thematic research collection aimed at problematizing the persistent faith in the realism of the photographic “document” by focusing on photography as a social, scientific, and aesthetic practice.

The project was conceived and curated by undergraduate students enrolled in History and Theory of Photography (AHIS 373g), taught by Megan Luke (Art History), and supported by Ahmanson Lab staff as well as Michaela Ullman and Suzi Noruschat in USC Libraries Special Collections. It contains 192 photographs culled from the diverse holdings of the USC Digital Library. Students in the course researched and wrote descriptive entries for each photograph as well as five short thematic essays into which those photos/entries were arranged in the project.

While Ahmanson Lab staff designed, developed, and styled the online project, students, guided by Megan Luke and Curtis Fletcher, the Director of the Ahmanson Lab, were responsible for thinking through the best way to create an exploratory, multi-thematic structure using primary sources. Each photo/entry was attached to several themes within the project; readers can discover a given photo/entry by way of any one of multiple themes; readers can also navigate to any associated theme from a given photo/entry. The project thus required students to master content related to the history of photography, and at the same time, apply critical digital literacy skills in situating the photos + entries within an archive-like scholarly information architecture.