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

Ghost Maps

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Ghost maps are hand-crafted composites of archival analog cartography and vector-based digital GIS layers. They are designed visually to reveal time, change, events, and motion through the symbolic languages of color, shape, iconography, and textual annotation. They are dense, deep maps, not made to be read quickly, as would be mere illustrations or diagrams. As a rich and complex graphical composition drawn directly from the profound complexity of past social life itself, the content of a ghost map—like the metropolis itself—exceeds the capacity of any textual narrative to explain it. Each ghost map, crafted in pictorial language, is a free-standing document, offered for the reader to ponder and to puzzle over, to return to many times.

Ghost Map 1, La Placita

Ghost maps are one part of my effort in Ghost Metropolis and elsewhere, to expand the range of the historian’s craft, by recounting the past through cartography and visual media alongside, and in combination with textual narrative. While verbal text is inescapably linear and narratological, cartography and photography operate by simultaneity and juxtaposition. Bringing together multiple modes of representation and interpretation is not only a new but a necessary consequence of my basic claim that the past literally takes and makes place. Knowledge and understanding about the past is inherently cartographic, grounding it in the material and the imaginary topologies of human interaction.

Use direct link to full-resolution web copies of Ghost Maps:
Ghost Map 1: La Placita
Ghost Map 2: East LA
Ghost Map 3: Vernon-Central
Ghost Map 4: Baldwin Hills

The links below are "Media Pages," for each Ghost Map: Select "Metadata" to access full-resolution link. 

This page has paths:

  1. Networks Phil Ethington

Contents of this path:

  1. Geveronga - Yaanga / El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora Reina de Los Angeles / La Placita / Downtown / Los Angeles, California, USA, 0 CE - 2000 CE
  2. Geveronga / El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora Reina de Los Angeles / Eastside / Vernon Central, Los Angeles, California, USA, 0 CE - 2000 CE. Cartography by Phil Ethington 2010
  3. Yaanga / El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora Reina de Los Angeles / San Rafael / San Antonio / East LA / Los Angeles, California, USA, 0 CE - 2000 CE
  4. Saanga / El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora Reina de Los Angeles / Paseo de la Tierra / Baldwin Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA, 0 CE - 2000 CE

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