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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 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.

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 not made to be read quickly, as would be mere illustrations or diagrams. Rather, each ghost map is a free-standing document, offered for the reader to ponder and to puzzle over, to return to many times. These ghost maps are sized to spread across two facing pages of the print version of Ghost Metropolis. 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 city itself—exceeds the capacity of any textual narrative to explain it.

nwe from presner vol:
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.

Geveronga - Yaanga / El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora Reina de Los Angeles / La Placita / Downtown / Los Angeles, California, USA, 0 CE - 2000 CE

Geveronga / El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora Reina de Los Angeles / Eastside / Vernon Central, Los Angeles, California, USA, 0 CE - 2000 CE

Yaanga / El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora Reina de Los Angeles / San Rafael / San Antonio / East LA / Los Angeles, California, USA, 0 CE - 2000 CE

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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Reader's Guide Ghost Metropolis is a hybrid work composed of multiple genres designed to follow narrative pathways, and geospatial and visual forms of the past, structured along networks of intersections, both geometric and metaphoric. Because all human action takes and makes place, the object of Ghost Metropolis is to map the past into the present, using many interwoven textual and visual genres together, ensemble. It is a work of textual, visual, and spatial narratives and of the intersections among them. Following Cervantes, Mercatur, and Melville, I've constructed a large-scale work of many different components, and many different genres. Most of the components of Ghost Metropolis are, like the short stories Cervantes folded into Don Quijote, free-standing. Ghost Metropolis is composed of forty-two (42) narrative essays and many visual narratives. Visual media numbering several hundred belong to the genres: photographs, maps, montages, panoramas, and videos. Readers may follow many different paths through this work. It can be read chronologically from 13,000 years ago until the present; it can be read by narrative pathways that follow the course of a general area of social and political life; it can be read between subject areas on the same chronological period, in chronosections. The forty-two textual essays of Ghost Metropolis are grouped into five narrative paths: Manna From Hell; etc. It can also be read via intersections and networks through and between the textual and visual narratives. Visual Genres Photographs Still images recorded to photosensitive films and digital devices. Photographic Narratives Semantic-photographic stories. -Curated sequences of static images. Panoramas Sweeping views of multiple directions from a single camera position, forming a circle of varying wide-angle degrees, to a maxium of 360˚. Montages/Photomontages Assemblages of photographs and graphic arts, including cartography. Maps Pictorial cartography. A special case of annotated pictorial form, maps usually carry semantic symbols that index or reference a depiction of some region of the Earth’s surface. Ghost Maps Visually layered visualization of geohistoric development. Cartographic Narratives Curated sequences of maps. Video All motion pictures. All photographic representations produced with equipment designed to capture motion in discrete frames and to edit those frames and re-present them at rates too frequent to be detected by the visual perception and cognition of the human mind. Cinematic Narratives -Curated sequences of film stills or clips taken directly from cinematic sources. Does not include “production stills” taken by still camera equipment during the making of movies. Cinematic narratives are only taken from motion photography—in whatever format, film to digital. Audio -All soundtracks lacking moving images. Includes but is not limited to the subgenres of music, radio, recorded voice of any kind, from oral histories to dramatic narratives, and the sound-tracks of movies and videos of any kind.
Genres (new) Textual Genres Narrative Essays Prose essays that narrative, analyze, and interpret the past. Narrative Paths Sequential collections of narrative essays that tell larger stories. Visual Genres Photographs Still images recorded to photosensitive films and digital devices. Panoramas Sweeping views of multiple directions from a single camera position, forming a circle of varying wide-angle degrees, to a maxium of 360˚. Montages/Photomontages Assemblages of photographs and graphic arts, including cartography. Maps Pictorial cartography. A special case of annotated pictorial form, maps usually carry semantic symbols that index or reference a depiction of some region of the Earth’s surface. Ghost Maps Visually layered visualization of geohistoric development. Video All motion pictures. All photographic representations produced with equipment designed to capture motion in discrete frames and to edit those frames and re-present them at rates too frequent to be detected by the visual perception and cognition of the human mind. Audio -All soundtracks lacking moving images. Includes but is not limited to the subgenres of music, radio, recorded voice of any kind, from oral histories to dramatic narratives, and the sound-tracks of movies and videos of any kind.
Maps While "map" can mean many things, it is used here to denote pictorial cartography. A special case of annotated pictorial form, it usually carries semantic symbols that index or reference a depiction of some region of the Earth’s surface. Ghost Maps: Visually layered visualization of geohistoric development.
Cartography Cartography Ghost Maps Archival

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