Saturday, June 13, 2009

Review 2 Los Angeles and the problems of urban historical knowledge

The introduction to this digital website is clear and concise. The format which Philip Ethington used to create this website, offers the viewer a straightforward historiography of the urban development of Los Angeles and its surrounding boroughs. Ethington stops to ask the question how can one authenticate the growth of an urban area from its beginings to its future. Much of the research he has done represents his findings through essay's, photography, maps and historical models available from archives.
The map images and essays work together to form a synopsis of Los Angeles during the start of its urbanization origins. The components of each section work well together. Ethington has strives to make his argument and prove his point implicitly from the aspects of technology. There are no sections that do not encompass a proportion of the whole aspect of the website.
The site can be studied as a whole or users may utilize the areas that piratical interest them and still grasp the concept of the material presented to its audience. The sites aim is to sort out the theme of Los Angeles’s as a historical metropolis and what makes it so unique as compared to other metropolis.
Ethington points out the daunting task he took on by putting together his argument. Encompassing all of L.A.'s vast urban history was overwhelming, and required Ethington to collaborate with various other historians to put together this site. Urban history changes quickly and it is hard to record each moment and trend that passes through urban society.
This site was created to bring a new form of representation to historical attributes of Los Angeles’s. Finding history in existing artifacts presented genuine sources of knowledge for Ethington. Scaled down models of the city of Los Angeles, provided evidence of renewal and the destruction of historical neighborhoods in L.A.
Walter Benjamin and Eduardo Cadava, historians that have contributed to Ethingtons’s site, have interesting theories and ideas about historgraphy and photography. By placing the space foremost and not representing ourselves, but understanding and grasping the history of space the photograph. By applying this theory when constructing a digital history website helps to brings perspective and purpose to the site. Reconstructing history through photographic sources can aid when trying to collaborating dates and events as well as other historical details. By recreating the past through photography one creates a porthole to the past.

Limitations, which Ethington met with while creating this site, were not being able to use “frames” which is a common way to organize web sites. Ethington did not view this as a obstruction, instead he feels it made the site more “simple and elegant.” The drawbacks that he did face were the laborious hours spent manually setting links. He laid out his directories in a hierarchical tree organization by a major categories menu bar. His labor, research, collaboration and vision worked out well. A novice or pro can easily navigate the site.

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