Hypercities

Hypercities is a dedicated “thick mapping” digital humanities tool which interfaces with Google Earth, and which allows for a high density of layered multimedia historical data from a variety of sources and voices. It was born of a collaboration between the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Southern California, and the project has since gained input and support from Harvard University. It is a free, open-source tool; projects can be hosted on the central Hypercities platform (accessible through Hypercities Earth), or hosted on a home institution server through the installation of the Hypercities source code.

Hypercities is highly interactive, with powerful timeline manipulation features and a high capacity for multimedia integration. It can be integrated with USC’s digital publishing tool, Scalar, or deployed independently of other tools.

Example Applications

Hypercities’ main website features a gallery of projects which use the platform. In keeping with the tool’s strong Los Angeles roots, many of the existing projects are anchored in Los Angeles history—or else in the shared concerns of the Pacific Rim, as in the several projects which cover the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and its aftermath.

The most successful Hypercities projects utilize its potential to show history and culture as an aggregation of individual voices. Examples include The L.A. Research Collection, which integrates personal archival materials and narratives from Los Angeles’s historic Filipinotown with census and demographic data; and Tehran Election Protests 2009, which provides a street-level interactive guide to the protests and violence in Iran’s capital following the highly contested 2009 election. Projects like these function as real-time, polyvocal geospatial archives.

Digital Humanities Potential

Hypercities is ideally suited to projects which require pluralist historical testimony and multimedia integration. It allows for virtually limitless layering of historical street maps, documents, images, and videos. It also easily accommodates the integration of georeferenced and timestamped web-based data such as Twitter content; this content can be aggregated and placed automatically, as documented in one of Hypercities’ tutorials. Hypercities is thus an especially good platform for aggregating eyewitness testimonies of recent historical events. However, archival materials such as personal correspondence, photographs, and oral histories could be integrated with similar ease.

This tool should not be used as a platform for projects requiring geoprocessing. While data can be filtered through timeline manipulation and other attributes, the tool is unsuitable for heavy quantitative analysis, or for projects requiring the display of extensive coverage data. It is also not a good fit for projects requiring visual customization of the map display, or for those relying on the ability to create supplementary print materials, website embedding, and other enactions of the research materials outside of the Hypercities platform itself.

The technical barriers to accessing and contributing to Hypercities mean that its polyvocality and multiple-authorship features need to be mediated through the scholar rather than directly crowdsourced. It could not easily accommodate a community-built digital archive, or any other humanities project requiring active participation from individuals of varying technical expertise.

Advantages

Hypercities is versatile, data-rich, and highly interactive. It was designed specifically for digital humanities, and is far more accommodating of humanist scholarly concerns than tools designed for industrial purposes. It flourishes as a platform for real-time public histories and interactive geospatial archives, and its layering of multiple projects and histories over a single geographic location allows for pluralism, conceptual ambiguity, and the foregrounding of marginalized experiences.

 Hypercities’ strong institutional support at two leading research universities also offers this tool a promise of stability into the future. Hosting a humanities project on a web-based platform can be a perilous prospect for scholars, as these platforms have been known to fold or be absorbed into for-profit ventures; Hypercities, by contrast, is likely to remain stable, free, open-source in the long term.

Drawbacks

Creating projects in Hypercities requires a fairly high level of comfort with programming, and this is triply true if the scholar hopes to host the project on their own institutional servers. The source code is free and available to the public, but in the current iteration of the Hypercities home page, the code and documentation are difficult to find.

Other barriers to use include the tool’s mandatory interfacing with the Google Earth browser plugin, which, on older machines, may run very slowly or not at all. Maps are not easily embedded or exported, except through interfacing with Scalar; this means that not only must the project’s home institution accommodate Google Earth’s equipment requirements, but all potential users must be able to as well.

Thick mapping yields a trove of data and multimedia, but the resulting interface is in many ways clunky and unintuitive. Visual customizability is very low, as both the base map and the interface are reliant on Google Earth. Hypercities’ rather unfriendly interface may present serious barriers to its use as a pedagogical tool or an engine for collaborative research.

External Links

• Hypercities
• Hypercities Earth
• Hypercities Help wiki