HyperCities: The Challenges of Building a Web 2.0 Research and Teaching Platform

HyperCities (http://www.hypercities.com) is a collaborative research and educational platform for traveling back in time to explore the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment.
Todd Presner (http://www.toddpresner.com/?page_id=2) is Associate Professor of Germanic Languages, Comparative Literature, and Jewish Studies at the University of California Los Angeles. His research focuses on European intellectual history, the history of media, visual culture, digital humanities, and cultural geography. He is the author of two books: The first, Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-14012-6/mobile-modernity; Columbia University Press, 2007), maps German-Jewish intellectual history onto the development of the railway system; the second, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (http://www.muscularjudaism.pbwiki.com/; Routledge, 2007), analyzes the aesthetic dimensions of the strong Jewish body.

He is the founder and director of HyperCities, a collaborative, digital mapping platform that explores the layered histories of city spaces. Awarded one of the first “digital media and learning” prizes by the MacArthur Foundation/HASTAC in 2008, HyperCities is an interactive, web-based research and teaching environment for authoring and analyzing the cultural, architectural, and urban history of cities. The first HyperCities are Los Angeles, Berlin, New York, Rome, Ollantaytambo, and Tel Aviv, with many more in the works. The project co-PIs are Dean Abernathy, Mike Blockstein, Philip Ethington, Diane Favro, Chris Johnason, and Jan Reiff.

hm 4/21/10