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About the Project |
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The course orients students to the origins of the city, taking into account the complex interplay of geography, people, and culture from early settlement to its present configuration. The class also explores features of the city--buildings, freeways, parks—that come to define Los Angeles now. Course content draws from social science, arts, and humanities sources. Written work emerges from field trips on public transportation, training in library research, and a subsequent lab session in UCLA’s Special Collections. The class prepares students for university-level research and culminates in collaborative student-written annotations of artifacts from the collection that are then digitally pinned to an emerging cultural map of the city. Like City in Mind: Lyrical Map of the Concept of Los Angeles, acquired by Special Collections in 2011, this course derives from interplay of literature and urbanism found in a public humanities project, Libros Schmibros Lending Library, which commissioned the Lyrical Map for its 2011 installation at UCLA’s Hammer Museum
The first assignment sends students on the road. In teams of at least two, they are instructed to ride public transportation to any part of the Los Angeles River. This journey serves to expose students to the look and feel of the city. They are expected to observe in the manner of the sciences or social sciences, and then write up those observations in field notes for their day. Through that exercise they begin to identify their particular interests with respect to Los Angeles, or to cities more generally.
This class is based on the principle that the Library is the cerebral cortex of the University. To that end, the central development of the class is given over to the processes of writing a university-level research paper, from learning the correct way to search for sources at UCLA to expressing their ideas in good, coherent prose that anyone would like to read. Because the best writing comes from passion, not prompts, students are encouraged to follow their interests, developed on the road trips, as they choose the subjects of their papers. The class is then divided into work groups based on the overarching rubrics of their individual interests, which generally follow these categories: arts and culture; architecture and urban planning; history; neighborhoods; politics and society; and science and the environment. After completion of their individual research papers, each work group then undertakes collaborative study and annotation of an artifact from the Library’s rare and archival holdings.
As soon as research paper topics are determined, Special Collections librarians start selecting materials appropriate for each work group and arrange for a boutique lab class. Backpacks are stowed and white gloves donned as students explore boxes of artifacts that relate to their interests. Lab day is always an exciting one. The class has been building toward it from the beginning, but until the chance to hold letters or photos from the distant past actually arrives, Special Collections remains a foreign land, materials from the past an abstraction. By the end of the lab session eyes and minds are opened, and sometimes even hearts. By handling original and rare objects and materials from the past, students make present-day connections that transform their notion of history, or politics, or the presence of science in everyday lives, and begin to imagine how such work might influence their education or career.
What do they choose to annotate? Everything. From medical studies published in old Chinatown to photographs of WPA services like the Toy Lending Library, each work group has its own unique personality and driving interests. In spite of their individuality, certain themes and preoccupations reappear: Chavez Ravine and the extirpation of the Mexican community there; the L.A. Riots, and the Watts Riots before them; Skid Row and the heartbreak of homelessness; cinematic achievements; natural disasters; government workings benign and corrupt; graffiti, and public art more generally. The annotations comprise an archive in their own right and are justly the focus of this site. They give us a window into what’s on the minds of future citizens of Los Angeles, and point toward a consciousness of the city yet to be.
The work gathered here is arranged according to rubric as well as relative geography. Whenever possible, annotations and their associated images are linked to the city coordinates most pertinent to their field of action. But even in a geo-locating website, space and time are relative, and editorial judgment prevails. For example, does the annotation about the muralist Hugo Ballin rightfully belong next to Griffith Observatory or to Wilshire Boulevard Temple, for both of which he painted frescoes? Or does it belong well off the map, in La Jolla, where the mural in the archival photo actually exists? To follow another example, where does an annotation about the 1980s punk scene belong? Pointing to the long-gone Anti-Club on Melrose Avenue, or the East Los Angeles garage where Los Lobos originated?
Not all displacements of geography are as extreme as those listed above. Even in more confined spaces, questions arise; for example, where, precisely, does one locate the Watts Riots? How do you represent the breadth of an earthquake? What do you do about inevitable redundancies as subsequent classes discover, each in their own way, the city hidden in the subterranean stacks?
Answers to these questions are found in the extraordinary efforts at organization of information made by Dawn Childress, UCLA Digital Scholarship librarian and framer of this site. Her wizardry resulted in a protocol by which students can upload their own work knowing it will be associated with the right place on the map. In particular, she devised a way to extend the site’s visual reach from metropolitan Los Angeles to the entire region, thus illustrating the city from the mountains to the desert to the sea.
The subsequent site is thus geo-locational as well as interpretive, making allowances for how an event occurring in one place and time does indeed affect the whole of the city. This urban action at a distance means that the nature of the metropolis we find here is relational and to some degree oblique—there is no absolute Los Angeles. Instead, the site displays multiple foci, distorted according to interest and attention, ordered by academic inquiry, and driven to some degree by student familiarity. It becomes a reflection of the experience of the city through their eyes, only slightly denatured by editorial interference.
The point of the class is to instill good prose habits and some research skills appropriate to UCLA. The larger goal is cogent public writing that will enrich student lives at the University and beyond. In the course of the quarter, they are challenged to learn everything from navigation of UCLA’s vast library system to elementary coding for entering their annotations and images. Along the way they are invited to participate in the very meaning of a university—contribution to the accretion of knowledge, and participation in intellectual life.
-- Colleen Jaurretche