Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles from Clovis to Nixon Main Menu Regimes: Ruling the Los Angeles Region from the Late Pleistocene to the 21st Century Places and Paths of Los Angeles Manna From Hell: Power and Politics from Region to World Power Shadows: Visual Cultures and Mass Media of a Regional and Global Power Segregated Diversity: The Geosocial Formation of Social Justice in the Late Twentieth Century Richard 37th: Nixon, Los Angeles, and World Power The American 1989: Los Angeles at the Climax of the 20th Century Narrative Essay Bibliographies, Filmographies, Gazeteers, Indexes Mapping the Past: Theory, Methods, Historiography Path Credits Root

Digital Methods

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Ghost Metropolis may be seen as a work of the "digital humanities," as I conceive "the humanities" in the Diltheyan sense of interpreting the value, purpose, and meaning of past actions that literally "took place."  But Ghost Metropolis is a work of both the humanities and the social sciences.  My theory of regional regimes, for instance, is in large part a falsifiable model of the historicity of intergenerationally-durable institutions--those that constitute a "region" as a living regime of power and culture.  Most of the essays in the path "Segregated Diversity" are works of quantitative spatial sciences, differing significantly in genre from many other essays in Ghost Metropoli.  It is most accurate to say that Ghost Metropolis is a work of the "Digital Human Sciences," an attempt to render the dual sense of interpretation of and explanation that can be practiced by blending the humanistic and the social scientific.

Digital methods can be usefully separated into three categories: 1) repositories, databases, and archives; 2) interpretive or analytical operations conducted on archival objects or data; and 3) presentational: the form in which a work is presented to readers. Ghost metropolis has involved all three of these types of digital work.  I have long built digital repositories of numerical data, spatial data, and textual data, along with photographs, videos, and maps.  I have also analyzed numerical data using (digital) computational means, along with spatial data using Geographic Information Science (GIS) software.  I have helped to design and build software "platforms" that enable multi-modal/multi-media publication.  My first effort to develop a space-time-textual platform for scholarly research was the ISLA prototype developed at USC in the 1990s.  In the early 2000s, I was co-PI with Todd Presner and Janice Reiff on the geohistorical visualization and narration platform HyperCities.  Beginning in 2009, I joined Tara McPherson, Steve Anderson, Erik Loyer, and Craig Dietrich in the development of Scalar, the platform in which you are reading Ghost Metropolis.

Scalar was developed within a large inter-institutional collaboration funded by the Mellon Foundation to provide an optimized environment for scholarly publishing in multimedia form.  (Full disclosure: I am one of the PIs of the Mellon grants and one of developers of Scalar).  Scalar has a "flat" structure, so that every "page" (which can be textual material, or media objects, or tags or paths or annotations) can be related to every other page in many different ways.  It is not hierarchical like most web sites, so you don't have to work your way back up out of deep tunnels.  Rather, you can skip freely across its elements in the way we read newspapers.  But the "platform" should not itself demand much of your attention while you read Ghost Metropolis, any more than you need worry about the technicalities of paper or ink when you read a newspaper.  It takes no knowledge of digital media whatsoever to read Ghost Metropolis in Scalar.  All you need to do is follow your interests.