The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of Southern California (USC) seek funding to create the Digital Encyclopedia of Los Angeles (deLA). The metropolis of Los Angeles, with its extraordinarily diverse population of more than 15 million people, has a history as vibrant and diverse as its multitude of communities and world-class institutions, as tumultuous as its natural environment. From race relations to international relations, from immigrant cultures to the Hollywood culture industry, the demographic and cultural forces shaping Los Angeles are also those shaping the United States and much of the world. The Digital Encyclopedia of Los Angeles will describe and interpret the complex entity often taken to be the representative twenty-first century city, from its beginnings in 1781 as “El Pueblo de Los Angeles” to its contemporary expression of an urban environment that has been called “postmetropolis.” The benefit of this project for the humanities promises to be very great, especially in improving the quality of knowledge available in digital form. Currently there is no single, trustworthy and reliable source of comprehensive knowledge about Los Angeles available on the Internet. A grant from the NEH will powerfully establish this project.
Our intention is to produce a work of uncontested reliability and scholarly excellence, driven by a coherent and clear editorial vision, to which readers at all educational levels and in many walks of life can turn for an authoritative understanding of Los Angeles. Joined in partnership with many other educational, cultural, and civic institutions throughout the Los Angeles area, UCLA and USC are ideally positioned to gather together the scholars, information management specialists, archivists, and creative individuals necessary to produce an encyclopedia of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. Conceived from the start to take full advantage of the multimedia and database capacities of publishing online, deLA will meet the high standards of the best published reference works while also employing innovative means of organizing, displaying, and accessing information. As a “living” encyclopedia available to the public free of charge on the World Wide Web, deLA aspires to be a continually evolving and updated work of reference, history, and interpretive commentary.
Co-Directed and Co-Edited by Philip J. Ethington at USC and Eric J. Sundquist at UCLA, the project will be created by a team with unrivalled experience, not only in Los Angeles research, but also in academic librarianship and online computing standards. By using diverse kinds of interpretive essays, documents, database materials, maps, timelines, and related multimedia, our goal is to create new knowledge through original scholarship while also taking advantage of the significant array of available databases and digitized archival material pertaining to Los Angeles. The digital nature of deLA will make it possible to draw on existing resources to publish a sizable portion of the encyclopedia much more quickly than has been the case with comparable print-based metropolitan encyclopedias. With the proposed three-year NEH funding, we plan to have completed (final edited and catalogued) about 33% of the encyclopedia’s Entries. These will have been entered into the Content Management System (CMS), ready to “go live” with the public Release 1.0 of deLA in project Year 4 (2007).
See project website at:
http://cwis.usc.edu/dept/LAS/history/historylab/deLA/index.html