Digital project that preserves lost history of cities wins major award from MacArthur Foundation

A Web site that grew out of a UCLA assistant professor's desire to illustrate the dramatic and often tragic history of Berlin is one of 17 projects to win a new digital innovation prize funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Todd Presner, now an associate professor of Germanic languages at UCLA, will use the $238,000 purse from the MacArthur Foundation's inaugural Digital Media and Learning Competition to expand his Hypermedia Berlin project. With six collaborators from UCLA and other institutions, he plans to illuminate the history of three equally dynamic cities: Los Angeles, Lima and Rome. As a group, the collection of Web sites will be known as HyperCities and will eventually include three-dimensional computer models and allow the public to upload historical information.

"The purpose of HyperCities is to create a digital archaeology of a city space. It allows people to find out what used to be there, to navigate the great cities of the world over time," Presner said. "We have a fantastic team of universities and community partners to realize this collaborative vision."

Todd Presner

Along with 16 other winning projects, HyperCities was selected from 1,010 applications. The winning entries will share a pot of $2 million, according to a joint statement from the MacArthur Foundation and the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Collaboratory (HASTAC), a scholarly consortium that administered the prize.

Winners to lead innovation in digital media

"Winning projects are expected to produce promising innovations in the use of digital media for formal and informal learning," the statement said.

Only one other project was selected from Southern California. Critical Commons, a blogging, social networking and tagging platform specially designed to promote the fair use of copyrighted material in education contexts, is based at USC. The project was awarded $61,000.

Presner's collaborators on HyperCities will include UCLA alum Dean Abernathy, an assistant professor of architecture at the Institute for Advanced Technology at the University of Virginia; Michael Blockstein, principal of the Los Angeles nonprofit Public Matters; Philip Ethington, a history professor at USC and associate dean for regional initiatives of USC's Information Services Division; Diane Favro, a professor of architectural history at UCLA and director of UCLA’s Experiential Technologies Center; Christopher Johanson, a UCLA doctoral candidate in classics and associate director of UCLA's Experiential Technologies Center; and Janice Reiff, an associate professor of history and statistics at UCLA. With projects throughout South America, Europe and the Middle East, UCLA's Experiential Technologies Center builds 3-D computer models of lost or dramatically altered cultural landmarks, including Rome’s Colosseum and Roman Forum, Jerusalem’s Second Temple and sites in Pompeii.

HyperCities will elaborate on the digital platform pioneered for Hypermedia Berlin, which allows visitors to trace the city's 800-year history from a tiny settlement along the Spree River to today's major world capital.