Digital City
Information technology, interdisciplinary approach help shed light on elusive L.A.
By Eva Emerson
When USC College urban historian Philip Ethington first arrived in Los Angeles a year after the 1992 riots, the city was exploding—not with violence but with a contemplation of itself that was deeper and more rooted in scholarly tradition than ever before. In the wake of the riots, he says, the city developed an urgent need to know itself outside of the mythical image (supplied by early city developers and the film industry) that had long shrouded its true nature.
“Los Angeles is a young city,” says Ethington, associate professor of history. “It is more amorphous and fragmented than New York or Chicago, and so it has taken scholars longer to study and understand it.
“The challenge of making sense of such a vast and complex thing as a big city is what initially got me interested in exploring digital technologies,” continues Ethington, whose career has been marked by his cross-disciplinary forays into sociology, geography, political science and urban planning, as well as his use of technology to organize, archive and, in doing so, study the historical city.
Before joining the College, Ethington earned his Ph.D. in American history at Stanford and was a visiting scholar at Harvard. His first book, “The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900” (Cambridge University Press) is a study of the way public culture shapes socio-political development.
In Los Angeles, he encountered a city ripe for scholars. “The amount of untapped original documentary material available for researchers of Los Angeles is truly staggering,” he says.
Beginning in 1994, Ethington began a close collaboration with the Information Technology Services (ITS), to build a virtual archive of these documents. Eventually, the archival database would be made available online, creating an electronic outpost for studies of Los Angeles and the region.
At a time when most people still did not use e-mail regularly, his team began to digitize historical photos, papers, manuscripts, newspapers, data, dissertations, maps and paintings from USC and, later, from the collections of partner institutions.
Most dramatically, Ethington and his students rescued some 400,000 recipe-sized survey cards from pigeon droppings and the ravages of time. Almost forgotten, the cards contained valuable data about 1.5 million residents collected during the 1939 Household Survey of Los Angeles. Cleaned and organized, the data became a key part of the database.
Along with other key Los Angeles databases that Ethington helped to create, his latest collection of data is now part of ITS’s Digital Archive, a growing meta-database housed within the USC Archival Research Center (ARC) of Doheny Library. Now considered the most comprehensive collection of Los Angeles’ past and present, ARC allows investigators from all over the world to search, view and download digitized primary historical sources.
“Our goal has been to make USC the major portal for studying the region,” he says. That role is a natural, he adds, pointing to USC’s long record of excellence in information sciences and technology, and the College’s critical mass of outstanding faculty who make Southern California the focus of their work.
“Phil has created a resource that pulls every kind of information about Los Angeles and the region into a central data bank. This will allow scholars in any field to access a range of materials that provide a multidimensional vision of the city at any given time,” says Steve Ross, professor of history at the College, who dubs the Digital Archive “a major intellectual project.”
Ethington has proposed a new project that will take him a step closer to greater public understanding of Los Angeles. In collaboration with colleagues at USC, UCLA and other leading area institutions, he plans to publish an online encyclopedia focused on the city. Though still in negotiations, the ambitious project would be the first comprehensive Internet encyclopedia about the city, revealing the relationships between Los Angeles’ geography, history and culture.
“The College has long played a leading role in regional scholarship,” says Joseph Aoun, dean of the College and Anna H. Bing Professor. “Phil’s work on the digital archives has helped cement USC’s position as the center for research on Los Angeles.”
Greg Hise, an urban historian at USC’s School of Policy, Planning and Development, says that the majority of archives are now moving toward digitizing collections. “Phil recognized that trend very early and pushed the university to become a leader in those efforts,” he says.
Ethington’s interest in technology is balanced by his drive to create new knowledge about the city.
His work has helped to raise awareness of the diverse history of Los Angeles, including evidence that Latin Americans with African ancestry were among the city’s founders, and the influential role that Los Angeles’ small but prosperous African-American community of the 1930s and ’40s played in creating the city of today.
In another study, he has linked the emergence of a conservative political movement in Southern California (think Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Pete Wilson) to demographic changes recorded in census data—and analyzed it with the help of technology.
Other products of his research include his findings and animated maps that illustrate how neighborhoods have changed in terms of race and wealth from 1940 to 2000. Together, these provide a vivid picture of a city still segregated by class and ethnicity.
“The striking thing is the deepening division between a blue-collar, non-white population living at the core of the county, and a white-collar, white population living on the periphery,” says Ethington, who serves as an editor of the journal Urban History.
That trend, Ethington points out, does not bode well for a city on the mend. “The isolation of wealth and whiteness outside of downtown, along with the city’s extreme socio-economic contrasts between the wealthy and the working poor—the majority of whom are minorities—is grist for the mill of social conflict and civil disorder.”
In 2002, Ethington’s involvement in USC information sciences and technology became official with his appointment to associate dean for regional initiatives in ITS.
He believes that scholarly attention and digital resources like ARC and, in the future, the online encyclopedia will help Los Angeles build a greater sense of community.
“In a city where neighborhoods are regularly leveled or dramatically changed, it’s especially important for people to hang on to their history,” Ethington says.
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The Old Court House is the tallest building in this 1868 panorama (top) captured from the corner of Broadway and Temple. Los Angeles City Hall, built in 1928, is the tallest building in the 2000 image (bottom) taken from near the same corner.
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