As part of a collaboration between a number of universities over many years, Professor of Germanic languages Todd Presner’s project HyperCities, a Web-based platform that shows Berlin as it evolves over centuries, has won a grant totaling $238,000 from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
The award will be presented today to Presner at a day-long convention in Chicago for the 17 winners. Recipients were selected from 1,010 applications for the first-ever Digital Media and Learning Competition run by the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory and funded by the MacArthur Foundation.
Collaborators on Presner’s winning project extend throughout many disciplines, including architecture, history and statistics, and include UCLA Professors Diane Favro, Christopher Johanson and Janice Reiff, a USC professor, a University of Virginia professor and a community member from Los Angeles.
The project now covers the 800-year history of Berlin through maps from the past.
“The project is linked with Google Maps, but Google Maps only offers the present, and we wanted to offer the past,” Presner said.
With the grant money, the team hopes to expand the project to include Los Angeles, Rome and Lima.
Reiff, an associate professor of history and statistics, has also been working on the project for Los Angeles and is a professor for the L.A. Cluster class. She said that this technology allows for the study of cities in new ways.
“This allows us to study how people think about a city, how they move about, what the boundaries are, and how it changes over time,” Reiff said.
Projects such as HyperCities that use digital media to study the humanities are becoming increasingly common, said Tim Stowell, dean of humanities.
“Technology is really changing the way people are doing work in the humanities,” Stowell said. “The way these maps work, they are not just maps, they are time depth maps, so you can see what used to be at a certain street corner 100 years ago might have been a farmer’s field.”
HyperCities was chosen to receive the grant in the innovation category of the Digital and Media Learning Competition. The winners, along with receiving grant money to continue working on their project for another year, will receive guidance from the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory and will be connected with other winners in hopes that they can collaborate and share their knowledge.
“We will be kicking off their mentoring with a day-long conference,” said Joy Ballard, grants management department assistant for the MacArthur Foundation. “We want to help connect them to each other. The competition is a rare joining of the drive of business with the traditional humanities studies, and so the winners are an amazingly diverse group.”
Hypermedia Berlin began in 2001 for a class Presner was asked to teach on Berlin and was done through the Center for Digital Humanities at UCLA.
When the project won a different grant two years ago, it expanded so a team of collaborators from many disciplines could work on it.
With the grant money, the team will expand to increase public access, so others can add their own information, their own stories of place and time to the project.
“It is not a finished project,” Presner said. “We have a year to build on this, and I am delighted that the MacArthur Foundation is sponsoring grants in digital media and learning. It is really visionary of the foundation to really look at what the 21st century is going to look like for education.”