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Diarna visits CESTA

Aron Rodrigue brought guests from the Diarna project to CESTA to share ideas about how to gather and share historical spatial data. Diarna (“our homes” in judeo-arabic) is a Digital Heritage Mapping project and geo-museum dedicated to documenting important sites in Jewish life in the Middle East and North Africa.

From Diarna’s reconstruction of Dar Bishi Synagogue in Tripoli

Jason Guberman and Frances Malino showed us how they collect references to sites and images of sites from Google Books, Hathi Trust and other cultural heritage archives. They combine these resources with site visits to gather any remaining evidence of sites that either have been destroyed or are in danger of being destroyed. They collect personal accounts and photographs on site, then rapidly build 3D models based on surviving evidence to produce rich online exhibits that include Google Earth fly throughs, 360 degree views, photographs, video and audio and text.

Not only are they constructing an extraordinarily rich archive, they are doing it with widely available tools: Trimble 3D warehouse, Sketchup, Picasa, YouTube, and 360 Cities.

Visit http://diarna.org

They are looking for volunteer researchers, videographers, translators, and 3D modelers (Sketchup). Contact info@diarna.org.

Attending: Aron Rodrigue (History, Stanford),  Frances Malino (History, Wellsley), Jason Guberman (Diarna), Zephyr Frank (CESTA), Nicole Coleman (CESTA)

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CESTA/French Culture Workshop Presents: Robert Morrissey (U of Chicago) – Friday May 3, 12-2pm RSVP

Dear All,
Our next event will take place at lunchtime next Friday, May 3. We will welcome Robert Morrissey (University of Chicago, French), the founder and director of the ARTFL project. In his talk, entitled From Books and Data (and Back), he will discuss various innovations that ARTFL has introduced with PhiloLogic, their search engine and text-mining service, as well as new developments with the digital Encyclopédie.
Please RSVP regarding your attendance. There is no reading for this event.
Exceptionally, this event, co-sponsored by the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis will take place 12-2pm on ***Friday, May 3. Also exceptionally, we will hold it in the “Gold and Honey” room on the 4th floor of Wallenberg hall. In order to access the space, please use the building’s elevator.
We will start with informal lunch 12-12:30pm, followed by the talk and discussion, lasting until 2pm. We look forward to seeing you next week!
all best,
JP, Dan, Biliana
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CESTA Presents: Between Two Booms: The Human and Environmental Consequences of Brazilian Ethanol Production

The Center For Spatial and Textual Analysis and The Department of History presents

Between Two Booms:
The Human and Environmental Consequences of Brazilian Ethanol Production

a talk by
Thomas D. Rogers
Assistant Professor of Modern Latin American History
Emory University

May 9,  2013 at 4:15pm
at the
Center For Spatial And Textual Analysis
4th Floor,  Wallenberg Hall,  450 Serra Mall,  Stanford University

Abstract: Brazil has experienced two booms in sugarcane ethanol production in the past 40 years,  the first taking place under an authoritarian military regime that used the power of the state to foment production and the second taking place under the tutelage of the Workers’ Party’s government in its search for a new developmental model. Inflation-plagued and debt-ridden administrations intervened between the two booms, during which time the framework of the first surge—including several state agencies—was dismantled. This talk will assess the environmental and political consequences of the first ethanol boom and place it in historical context.

Professor Rogers is the author of The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil (The University of North Carolina Press, 2010). The book was awarded the Warren Dean Prize from the Conference on Latin American History and the Henry A. Wallace Prize from the Agricultural History Society.


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CESTA Crowdsourcing In the News: History Experiment Uses Tech to Find New Stories

Here is a recent article on the Curating the Bay: Crowdsourcing a New Environmental History exhibit at the California Historical Society.

AP Photo/Eric Risberg

 

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New Publication by Matthew Booker

Matthew Booker, a close affiliate and collaborator with CESTA, has a new publication out. It contains materials created at the Spatial History Lab, and Matthew’s work in the lab helped contribute to the final version of the book.

Here is the link:

http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520273207

There will likely be an official book launch at the California Historical Society in July – we’ll post details once we have them.

Congrats, Matthew!

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New Faces Around CESTA

In addition to our new graduate fellows in Humanities + Design, we would also like everyone to be aware of some new or new-ish folks in the CESTA lab:

Celena Allen – GIS Specialist and project assistant
Gabriel Wolfenstein – Project Manager for the Mellon crowdsourcing projects (Year of the Bay, Living with the Railroads, 500 Novels)
Melanie Conroy – Lab Manager for Humanities + Design (not a new face, but we want to introduce her nonetheless!)
Jason Hepler – Academic Technology Specialist

And we have an army of new undergraduate research assistants for the spring quarter!

Sarah Sadlier
Alec Powell
Annalise Lockhart
Anne Evered
Diego Valiente
Eric Eichelberger
Jocelyn Hickcox
Laura Zehender
Matthew Walter
Raina Sun
Van Tran
Willys DeVoll
Varun Gupta

We hope that you all get to meet one another at some point, and be on the look out for social mixers over the summer!

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New Humanities + Design Graduate Fellows

The CESTA community would like to welcome the new Humanities + Design graduate fellows! The new grad fellows are Nicole DeBenedictis, Claude Willan, Maria Teodora Comsa, Marcelo Alejandro Aranda, and Hannah Marcus.

Beyond the exciting work that the fellows will be doing within Humanities + Design, this marks a new effort by CESTA to support graduate professional development as well as our already very strong undergraduate program.

 

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The View and The Value: Historical Geography of Signs in San Francisco

Hello All,
Join me next Friday, April 12th, at 10:15 A.M. for a presentation of my senior thesis project. I will be speaking in CESTA’s Gold + Honey room, on the fourth floor of Wallenberg Hall (Bldg 160). See flyer below:

The View and The Value: 
Historical Geography of Signs in San Francisco
A senior thesis in the Department of History
              Inline image 1 
[Photo: A survey from the enforcement of the 1965 Highway Beautification Act (HBA)]
My research examines signs in the public view of San Francisco, from the 1890s to the present. This curious and surprising line of local history indicates how cultural values influence the organization of space, relying upon maps identifying where and when signs have existed and textual sources that compare the laws of public versus private signage. With this case study, I hope to demonstrate the points at which property rights intersect and conflict with the freedom of speech.
During the past decade, corporate expenditures for advertising completed the shift away from print media and toward digital formats. Outdoor advertising experienced no such decline. I argue that the outdoor medium will become increasingly relevant, but the industry will become unrecognizable in the digital age. Soon, the development of virtual spaces for public and private speech will raise new questions about the management of real space. Can the ongoing controversy over online privacy inform the future of public control over open spaces? The answer requires proof that billboards create value for cities–or proof of the opposite.
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Upcoming Exhibition! Curating the Bay: Crowdsourcing a New Environmental History

Curating the Bay: Crowdsourcing a New Environmental History

April 7, 2013 – August 25, 2013

Opening Celebration, Sunday, April 7th, 4:00PM – 6:00PM
Free event, please RSVP at curatingthebayopening.eventbrite.com.

California Historical Society is embracing 21st-century technology to celebrate the Year of the Bay in 2013, by offering its extensive collections to a crowdsourcing experiment in its gallery and at yearofthebay.org.

In a year that is bringing the high-profile America’s Cup yacht races to the Bay, the opening of a new Bay Bridge span, and the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Port of San Francisco, the California Historical Society is staging an experimental exhibition of many items from its collections not publicly exhibited before. Many of these artifacts — photographs, paintings, and documents — present historical mysteries still to be solved. The historical society is welcoming the public into this rich collection of materials to contribute their own stories, knowledge, photographs, and other sources to create a richer, more diverse history of the San Francisco Bay.

The exhibition takes risks by asking visitors to fill in the blanks rather than presenting them with a finished narrative. It opens up the process of curating — usually reserved for trained professionals — to the public both in the exhibition and online as part of yearofthebay.org, a dynamic crowdsourcing experiment with researchers at Stanford University and Historypin, an innovative global social technology partner.

This exhibition has been generously supported by our funding sponsors: S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation, Placer Partners, Port of San Francisco, and Wells Fargo. Exhibition partners include: Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford University, EcoCenter at Heron’s Head Park, Golden Gate Audubon, Heyday, Historypin, Literacy for Environmental Justice, Port of San Francisco, San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, and San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. In-kind support is being provided by: The CBW Group, Hafner Vineyard, Herglotz Public Affairs, Lagunitas Brewing Company, and Sherwin-Williams. Institutional support to CHS is provided from the Hearst Foundation, Hewlett-Packard, The James Irvine Foundation, and San Francisco Grants for the Arts.

Website: http://www.californiahistoricalsociety.org/exhibitions/curating_the_bay.html

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Press for Rebooting History East Palo Alto Project

Be sure to check out the article on the Spatial History Project’s East Palo Alto Rebooting History film premiere in the San Francisco BayView newspaper!

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