Philip J. Ethington
Center for Interdisciplinary Research Fellowship Application
2004.02.02
Global Los Angeles, 1921-2001: The Cartography of Time
An interdisciplinary collaboration to test the frontiers of Web-based interactive scholarship.
DIGITAL VERSION OF THIS PROPOSAL, WITH LINKS SEE: http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~philipje
M-G-M Production, Mombasa, Kenya Colony, 1929
Ethington 2001
My area of interdisciplinary research is urban global history. For about 100 years, urban
scholars have drawn on a wide range of disciplines, but for the most part they have respected
the boundary between the social sciences and the humanities. Scholars generally either
conduct positive, hypothesis-driven social scientific research, or they conduct interpretive
cultural studies of “texts”: those of literary, visual and popular culture. Further, urban scholars in
the social sciences and the humanities have rarely attempted to incorporate the creative stance
of the fine arts into their own representations of metropolitan life. It is only in the last 20 years
that urban history has turned truly global, moving beyond "comparative" studies to a full
awareness of the trans-national processes that shape city life. The practice of urban history has
also gained powerful new tool with the multimedia and interactive dimensions of digital
publishing, via websites.
The challenge of representing a giant metropolis in most of its vital dimensions: social as
well as cultural; statistical as well as narrative; local as well as global; built and lived as well as
imagined; visual as well as textual; geographic as well as historical—has been the task I have
undertaken in writing my nearly-completed print book manuscript: Global Los Angeles, 19212001: A Cartography of Time (July 2004).1 I have planned all along to produce a second, digital
version of this book, presenting its material and argument in very different format, one which I
hope will have major implications for the future of interdisciplinary urban scholarship. The goal
will be to construct a multimedia work of the magnitude of a major book, but which stands on its
own two feet as distinctly a new genre of scholarship. I propose to conceptualize and
execute the digital/interactive Global Los Angeles: a peer-review published website that
establishes new boundaries for the possibilities of scholarship, achieves goals that are
impossible in book form, and pursues my thesis that the positive social sciences, the
interpretive humanities, and the creative fine arts can be joined productively through the
visual and spatial dimensions of investigation, representation, and knowledge. I propose
1
I have been working closely with University of California Press, in the development of this book, but I have not yet signed a contract because
the cost estimate has been unclear due to the images, maps, and graphics.
Philip J. Ethington
Center for Interdisciplinary Research Fellowship Application
2004.02.02
to spend the CIR fellowship year working collaboratively with demographer Dowell Myers in the
School of Policy Planning and Development, with photographic artist Robbert Flick in the School
of Fine Arts, and with the Director and of the Institute for Multimedia Literacy (IML) of the
Annenberg Center for Communication, My work directly addresses three of the four University
“Critical Pathways”: #1 Communications,” #3 “The Arts” and #4 “The Urban Paradigm,” as well
as the LAS College’s declared theme of “Internationalization and Urbanization.”
The book manuscript Global Los Angeles, 1921-2001: The Cartography of Time, is so
nearly completed that I can turn now to an utterly new task, and yet draw on material that is wellbuilt and fresh. Knowing, as I do, the complete thesis, argument, and implications of my Global
Los Angeles book frees me to speak most creatively with my colleagues in other disciplines to
press my arguments as far as they can go, in a new framework and genre: one which helps
illustrate my argument that interdisciplinary knowledge is linked through mapping. Global Los
Angeles is a 400-page manuscript conceived from the outset as a blend of cartographic,
photographic, and textual argumentation. I present a spatially-embedded narrative history of Los
Angeles, showing how the major institutional structures arose in their specific local configuration
and also how its institutions of globalism grew up around the four sectors of oil, motion pictures,
aircraft production, and residential home building. The evidentiary base includes archival
manuscripts and rare photography (from many archives, ranging from the Huntington Library in
San Marino to the Public Record Office in London); quantitative and spatial data (developed in
collaboration with USC’s Geographic Information Science Lab from 1996 to 2001); oral histories
conducted by myself and many others; to contemporary photography and compositions
executed by myself and others, including Dorothea Lange, George Hurrell, Julius Shulman,
William Claxton, Diane Arbus, and Robbert Flick. The story begins in 1921 because a variety of
events “took place” in that year, and because the 1920s was the decade that Los Angeles
became the metropole of the Trans-Mississippi West, became a global metropolis, developed its
most distinctive regional institutions. By the 1970s this metropolis had developed such a distinct
and powerful regional culture and political economy that it projected its power on the globe,
through institutions, image and cultural production, firms, political leaders, and
immigration/capital flows. The story culminates in a global metropolis that partially lifts itself out
of the nation-state, and yet projects the power of that nation-state as a loyal component.
Throughout Global Los Angeles, I seek to make the great historical foundations of
contemporary life visible: to empower us to “read” the contemporary condition of social and
international relations in the landscape around us. I argue that the actions of groups and
individuals in the past inscribed into the metropolitan landscape massive structures that shape
the lives and options of all subsequent generations. I narrate the inscription of social power and
institutions into the landscapes of greater Los Angeles and several global locations (with specific
attention to East Africa, Mexico, Japan, and Southeast Asia) . Specific accounts include
Richard Nixon, neighborhoods, Hollywood movie industry (including for instance the
Tarzan/Jungle genre, which I analyze through M-G-M’s massive Trader Horn expedition in
British East Africa in 1929-30); spatial segregation from 1940 through 2000; municipal formation;
oil, the auto-freeway-oil military industrial complex; mass electoral campaigns; mass
homebuilding; and avant-garde modernist architecture. These structures of Los Angeles are so
vast and complex, as well as so ordinary, that it has been the burden of this interdisciplinary
scholar to map their shapes and development, in ways that readers of my book (and proposed
website), can find readily intelligible. But I have faced limitations in the book form of this project.
Other studies of cities have used maps and images, but I propose a role for mappability which is
so vital that I really need to take advantage of the complex structures of cyberspace to match
the complex structures of the LA metropolis.
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Philip J. Ethington
Center for Interdisciplinary Research Fellowship Application
P-38 Lightnings and B-17 Flying Fortresses in Production, Over and in Los Angeles, 1940s
2004.02.02
Ethington 2003
In 1999 I embarked on an experiment to explore the frontiers of scholarship in the
medium of a website for a major scholarly journal. My multimedia “Los Angeles and the
Problem of Urban Historical Knowledge,” the American Historical Review’s first online-only
article, (2000) has been praised by one reviewer as “foundational scholarship” that “fully
integrates the primary and secondary aspects of the medium” and “uses the medium to truly
transcend the kind of scholarship that is constrained to the printed page.” I have been pleased
by the attention this website has received, but I see it as only a pilot-project for the current
proposal. The text at the center of the AHR website is about historical epistemology: how is it
possible to “know” a great metropolis? I supplied the reader with a wide range of visual and
cartographic material to consider the thesis of the central textual essay, plus several smaller
essays on related question.
Conceptualizing and building the Web-interactive digital version of Global Los Angeles
will present nearly the entire 20th-century history of Los Angeles, free from the constraints of a
printed book. I created the 2000 AHR Website, consisting of about 1,200 files, entirely alone,
just to see if it could be done that way. It took me almost a year. Constructing the digital Webinteractive version/adaptation of the Global Los Angeles book will be a different story. I shall
work with a team, to bring all parts of the project together in an environment of graduate training
and faculty collaboration. The underlying innovation of this proposed project is to explore
whether we can identify a publishing practice that is fundamentally interdisciplinary, wherein the
Web (cyberspace) is a space of interdisciplinarity, as opposed merely to a space of increased
communication.
Research Questions:
(1) How precisely does a digital Web-based interactive publication surpass the limitations
of printed scholarship? Is it really possible to match and surpass the achievements of traditional scholarship
in this new medium? Beyond the obvious advantages of instant access to more information and the ability to pile
thousands of images into a website, what precisely can a multimedia publication achieve intellectually, scientifically,
and interpretively? What is the best way to re-imagine a book manuscript as a digital website? Providing the
reader with multiple perspectives on the same historical developments is one important capability of an interactive
website, but how precisely does one best achieve that, and what exactly is gained?
(2) Can the connotative power of the Fine Arts (especially photography) be harnessed to
achieve critical interpretive goals, in the social science and the humanities, and
transcend the decorative commercial design approach to aesthetics that is almost
universal on the Web? The world of the fine arts long ago dropped its romantic and modernist mission to
“express” the truths of the experiencing soul. The worlds of Art, Visual Culture, and Art History are in a state of
fluidity where photography takes on many guises. Conceptually based work by artists such as Dan Graham, Ed
Ruscha, Robert Smithson, Berndt & Hilla Becher, Adrian Piper, Martha Rosler, Robbert Flick and Alan Sekula can
expose social relations in ways which are often similar to those of social scientists utilizing graphs and maps. The
visual power of this body of work joins the denotative and the connotative forms of reference. I have been arguing
in invited lectures on “Visual Culture” that the mix of geography and the humanties/social science methods I use
serves to anchor the connotative with the denotative, the interpretive with the positive ways of knowing, but this
argument needs to be tested.
(3) Does the structure of “cyberspace” actually enable interdisciplinary fusion of the
sciences, humanities, and the arts? Scholars and artists in and across these fields only rarely practice
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Philip J. Ethington
Center for Interdisciplinary Research Fellowship Application
2004.02.02
the collaborative laboratory-based team work that is so common in the natural sciences, health sciences, and in
engineering. I also seek to test my claims that epistemological certainty can be reached at the cartographic
intersection of denotation and connotation. This would establish a concrete link between the very different ways of
knowing that are represented in the three disciplines I bring together
Collaborative Work Plan:
My proposed project takes global urban history in a new interdisciplinary direction by
bringing the social sciences back into intimate contact with the humanities and the fine arts, and
configuring these forms of study and representation within the new medium of the Web. I begin
with the premise that the scholarly and critical-intellectual potential of the digital “new media”
cannot be taken for granted, and that this project is dedicated to test its potential—to be taken
as seriously as any book or article ever has. I have worked with my principal collaborators
separately on several specific projects and I will build on this familiarity now as I assemble a
single team.
Probability that Hispanics will have White Neighbors, 1940-2000 (Ethington, Frey and Myers, 2001)
0.90
0.80
0.70
0.60
0.50
0.40
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0.20
0.10
0.00
1940
1950
1960
1970
1980
1990
2000
My collaboration with Professor Dowell Myers began in 1999 when asked me to join his
team of investigators, analyzing the Census 2000 immediately upon its release. (It should be
emphasized that Professor Myers and I collaborate as sociologists: his home field and my
adopted field). We merged my 1940-1999 census series into a new seamless dataset, from
1940-2000, based on 2000 tract geography. In this Race Contours 2000 study, I headed the
segregation trend studies, showing the “Resegregation of Los Angeles”: trends of increasing
diversity alongside parallel trends toward increasing or static isolation between the racial groups:
Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians.2 My collaboration with Professor Robbert Flick began
while at the Getty Research Institute in 1996-7. In 1999 we integrated 13 miles of his
comprehensive sequential view photography of the streets of Los Angeles into my AHR website.
“Along Central, 1997”
Robbert Flick 1997
My collaboration with the Institute for Multimedia Literacy (IML)3 began in 1997 when I
was among the first faculty trained to explore innovative ways to use the new media in the
classroom. Under the direction of Staphanie Barish, the Institute provides support to cuttingedge applications of multimedia genre in the classroom. It also houses postdoctoral fellows who
conduct research. "The Multimedia Literacy Program isn’t about [providing] tools or teaching
[how] to build Web sites," says its creator Dean Elizabeth Daley: "This is about how multimedia
2
3
http://www.usc.edu/schools/sppd/research/census2000/race_census/index.htm
http://www.iml.annenberg.edu/
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Philip J. Ethington
Center for Interdisciplinary Research Fellowship Application
2004.02.02
– from hypertext links to digital video recordings to screen images – affords a totally new means
of investigation, interpretation and communication."
My collaboration shall take place in four laboratories: The IML Lab (Annenberg
Center), the History Lab4 (LAS), the Population Dynamics Research Group5 (SPPD), and
the Intermedia Lab6 (School of Fine Arts). I shall rotate my graduate RAs for this project, as
well as my current graduate advisees in History, American Studies, Political Science, and
Geography, through each of these labs, as we explore different facets of my overall conception
of Global Los Angeles. My faculty collaborators Flick (Fine Arts) and Myers (SPPD) shall most
likely be the primary advisers of two of the graduate RAs that I hire with the support of this
fellowship. Their own advisement will combine with mine on this project to produce a comentoring process across the disciplines. The third RA will most likely be one already under my
advisement, across the disciplines of History, Geography, American Studies and Ethnicity, and
Political Science. In any case, this third RA will also be affiliated with the IML. A reciprocal visit
to work for one week with my colleagues at the Instituto Mora in Mexico City is also planned, to
execute the Mexico City component of the Global Los Angeles Website.
The three graduate students are budgeted as 1/4time (10 hour/week) advanced
Graduate Research Assistants for the full academic year, with one student each drawn
from: 1) School of Policy Planning and Development and/or Political Science, Sociology,
and Geography) 2) from The School of Fine Arts, and 3) School of Cinema/Television
(Critical Studies Dept), Department of History and/or the Program on American Studies. I
have strong working relationships with each of these units. My project will support these diverse
departments, and also introduce the interdisciplinary goals of my project into their programs.
Weekly seminar/workshop meetings with my team of Graduate RAs will constitute the
core of the project. My dialogue with and presentation to the other CIR Fellows, in the bi-weekly
Seminars, will engage scholars and artists across the disciplines involved, with my principal
research questions and proposals on epistemology. I shall work directly with my Faculty
Collaborators Flick and Myers, and they shall advise two of the Graduate RAs in their own units.
Meetings with the Graduate RAs will be held twice weekly, for two hours each session. One
meeting each will be held in the IML lab; the second will rotate between the four labs. Flick and
Myers will attend these workshops when they are held in their own labs (once per month).
Constructing the Website version of Global Los Angeles is far more than a task of just bringing all
the materials together. September through December 2004 will be focused on two tasks: 1) Researching,
debating, and establishing the conceptual plan of the Global Los Angeles Website, and 2) Assembling the
raw materials: thousands of images I have archived in various forms (images I have acquired from scores
of archives plus my own images). A significant but not complex database shall be built, so that all
images shall be ready-at-hand on live disks in the correct formats. January through May 2005 shall be
focused on building and testing the Website, module by module. Previous experience teaches me that the
Website shall be composed of modules, but the shape and content of these shall not be determined until
December 2004. These sessions will essentially be an extended Laboratory experience. The goal will be
to conceive of a format and structure that achieves the integration of very different types of inquiry and
ways of interpreting and seeing data. The finished Website will be delivered to a publisher7 at the end of
the Fellowship year.
4
http://www.usc.edu/dept/LAS/history/historylab/
http://www.usc.edu/schools/sppd/research/popdynamics/
6
http://www.usc.edu/dept/matrix/
5
7
I am considering the History E-Book project of the American Council of Learned Societies http://www.historyebook.org/publishers.html, in
collaboration with eight major university presses, including California, Princeton, Oxford, and Columbia. Note, however, that this project has yet
to publish more than digital facsimilies of printed books, so I may need to negotiate an original plan with its editors.
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