Welcome to the Los Angeles Mural mapping project. This is an ongoing project that maps Los Angeles area murals from many sources, including collections from the University of Southern California, the University of California Los Angeles, and others.
This project acknowledges that the land on which many of the murals are located was home to the Gabrieleño-Tongva Tribe. For more information about Los Angeles and to better understand the context for which these murals exist please visit UCLA's Mapping Indigenous Los Angeles project.
This project began in UCLA’s urban humanities institute summer course, a hyper collaborative and interdisciplinary environment. It is 3 weeks long, students have class from 9 - 5, and each week sees the development and presentation of a project, each project building and integrating pieces from the one before. Students work in groups. A group might have someone who knows how to do video or photoshop, another who might be familiar with mapping software, and another with ethnographic experience. All the projects have Los Angeles as their spatial focal point. During the second week there is a mapping project where each group was tasked with utilizing multiple data sources and creating one meaningful map.
My role, along with several others including my GIS cohort from theInstitute for Digital Research and Education, Yoh Kawano and Albert Kochaphum, was as a support team. We were there specifically for anything map related, whether it be to dig up a historical map in our special collections, help find or utilize government data, or, as it turned out - help map out a special collection of murals from the USC Digital Library website. One of the groups began to develop an alternative walking tour of “free speech and paint” in downtown Los Angeles looking at the work of David Siquerios among others. Part of this tour was learning more about the murals located throughout downtown LA. As they were doing this they of course wanted more context and background. We quickly navigated to USC’s Digital Library site to look at Robin Dunitz’s Collection of photos on LA Murals. Upon reading the description of the collection there were oohs and ahhs. Literally. There was an immediate reaction to this collection as it contains over 3,000 images of murals located throughout Los Angeles. In addition Dunitz has written on the subject and there is an archive of her papers and notes related to the photos. The students had found their dataset, or at least one data set that they thought they could really use to inform their project.
BUT….they quickly learned there was much more to uncover if they were going to use this dataset in the ways that they had hoped. This is where those oohs and ahhs turned into a subtle frustration. In part it was the time factor of not having all the time in the world to search through and go through the site, but there was also the frustration of not being 100 percent sure of how to search through the records to find individual relevant murals, how to find murals located in one place, how to see relationships between murals, etc. We have become so accustomed to seeing information mapped out whenever possible that they thought it would just be a matter of a few clicks before the murals were seen against the backdrop of Los Angeles. Instead they were given a very traditional search result that they had to navigate through. The frustrating part was that many of the records had longitude and latitude data associated with them.
So now what? Luckily I had already had access to an excel sheet that had all the records for the Dunitz collection. Well, we had the metadata and our basic plan was to look at it and piece together a map for the students to use so they could look at all the murals at once. Which is what they were hoping for. And as we did this maybe we would learn some things in the process. We created a KML file which the students could load into Google Earth with the murals mapped and displaying the thumbnails images. All of sudden there was a transformative moment for many in the class were they suddenly got how these pictures of murals existed as a set of data. The simple process of placing these murals on a map like this turned what was a collection, a pile of pictures of murals in Los Angeles, into an active and breathing dataset that could help inform their projects.
The LA Mural Project was born!
I kept thinking about how this type of project could grow? How it could grow in terms of other collections. How it could grow in terms of being accessible. How it could grow in terms of building communities.
The project is now focused on preparing and providing data for various mural collections in Los Angeles. There are many aims of the project:
This is where we will put more information about outcomes from the datathon event including who participated and how/what we did with the mural data
Image source: USC Library. Using your imagination, Pomona, 1999More info