The W.M. Keck Foundation recently pledged $500,000 to UCLA for the establishment of an undergraduate program in digital cultural mapping.
The program will instruct undergraduate students in digital mapping, a relatively new technology that is being used across a range of academic disciplines including the humanities, social sciences and architecture.
Digital mapping makes use of advanced modeling software along with applications such as Google Maps and Google Earth to create three-dimensional representations of cities and structures or to present data sets in a spatial manner, said Willeke Wendrich, associate professor of Egyptian archaeology and one of the program’s directors.
“For example, you might want to find out the relationship between population density and distance to hospitals,” Wendrich said.
“So you can map this out and offer an analysis of proximity, and that way the map is your interface to finding out new information.”
Todd Presner, associate professor of Germanic languages and Jewish studies and another director of the program, said that digital mapping is also effective at analyzing the historical development of cities and cultures.
HyperCities, an ongoing project that Presner directs, uses Google’s mapping technology to create interactive layers that illustrate different time periods in a city’s history.
By “peeling back” these layers, users are able to explore the ways in which the city has changed over time.
HyperCities is currently used in a number of classes taught at UCLA, including the general education course, Los Angeles: The Cluster.
“Digital mapping is a very new field which is really just beginning to exist, but I think already the applications for it are very widespread,” Presner said.
Classes specifically designed to teach digital cultural mapping have been offered at UCLA for a few years now, but have been largely restricted to graduate students.
The goal of the Keck program is to introduce an interdisciplinary undergraduate curriculum in digital cultural mapping.
Presner said the curriculum will consist of two core courses in digital mapping, a series of classes in urban investigation and an internship in which students will work with faculty on specific research projects like HyperCities.
The Keck Foundation’s donation will fund the development of a new digital mapping laboratory equipped with about 20 state-of-the-art computers, each designed to support work groups of two to three people at a time, Wendrich said.
The lab will introduce “a classroom environment that is not just about listening and speaking, but is really conducive to cooperation … in which students and faculty will work together to build something,” she said.
The donation will also provide for the hiring of a post-doctoral fellow who will supervise faculty in coordinating the new curriculum.
Wendrich and Presner direct the program along with professor of architecture Diane Favro and associate professor of history and statistics Janice Reiff.
The directors will hold a faculty meeting later today to discuss the core curriculum and begin to train faculty.
Undergraduate classes in digital mapping are slated to begin in fall 2009, and the eventual aim of the program is to establish a minor in digital cultural mapping, Presner said.
“By teaching students to understand large-scale data sets using mapping and visualization tools, we are preparing them to enter the world of the 21st century,” he said.
This is the first contribution the Keck Foundation has ever made to a research university in the field of liberal arts.
“We’re very excited and grateful for the visionary support of the Keck Foundation,” Presner said.
This donation is the latest in over $18 million the Keck Foundation has pledged to UCLA since 1982, said university spokesman Phil Hampton.
The Keck Foundation is one of the largest charitable organizations in the United States, with assets exceeding $1 billion, according to the W.M. Keck Foundation Web site.