The Scalar platform is still in development at the University of Southern California, but Professor Matthew Delmont’s digital project, “The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock N’ Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia” (which is a companion to his new book of the same name) is a wonderful example of how scholars can use Scalar to display their research in new and exciting ways.
For more information on Scalar, visit the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture.
The HyperCities team has put together a great guide for navigating the platform. Check it out here:
The Editors of Urban History (Cambridge University Press) are pleased to announce the release of their latest multimedia companion, a HyperCities geohistorical visualization to accompany Rhodri Windsor-Liscombe, “A study in Modern(ist) urbanism: planning Vancouver, 1945–1965,” Urban History Vol 38:1 pp. 124-149.
This multimedia companion is available free of charge via the following link:
http://journals.cambridge.org/
This multimedia companion presents a selection of the chiefly visual discourse of planning in Vancouver 1945-1965. While concentrating on the Reconstruction era, the archival materials included begin with the picturing and imagining of the city during the 1920s. The selection intends to recover the tenor of expert rhetoric (the discursive amalgam of theory and experience), as well as of perceived and actual popular opinion; the captions also introduce summary information on the course of planning policy and practice in Vancouver over the two post-1945 decades. Consequently, it illuminates the emergence of a new level and diversity of media discourse on urban development and design accompanying the consolidation but also contesting of Modernist precept and practice in later modern North America.
The discourse on and the practice of town planning in Vancouver substantially increased in scope and depth during the post-Second World War era 1945-1965, and its evolution is the focus of this multimedia companion. During that period (in Canada denominated ‘Reconstruction’ after a series of wartime reports by specialist advisory committees published in 1944 and 1945) the redevelopment of the city became an issue of considerable official, professional and public attention and debate.
