June 1, 2004
Burnham 1909 Plan Gets Technology Update
EVANSTON, Ill. --- When Daniel Burnham showed his 1909 Plan of Chicago to the city’s business elite who commissioned it, he presented a proposal that influenced Chicago development for almost a century and remains a landmark in American urban planning.
Today Burnham’s document is the focus of an innovative, multidisciplinary class at Northwestern University that is trying to accomplish by putting together students of history and computer science what they couldn’t accomplish alone.
Called “Using Technology, Making History,” the experimental class is being taught for the second time by urban historian Carl Smith and Brian Dennis, assistant professor of computer science and journalism. Its goal is to work toward the creation of an electronic essay about Burnham’s Chicago plan that makes full use of the multi-media capacities of the Web and will serve as an entry in the online version of the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Chicago.
Smith, the Franklyn Bliss Snyder Professor of American Studies, has considerable experience doing scholarship on the Web. The curator of two historical Web exhibits for the Chicago Historical Society, he found the extended experience of working closely with computer specialists in Academic Technologies one of the most exhilarating in his career.
“Using Technology, Making History” is an attempt to provide a similar experience to undergraduates in the humanities and computer science interested in learning how to effectively do and think about scholarship for presentation on the Web.
The 1909 Plan of Chicago by Burnham and his design associate Edward Bennett proved an ideal focus because its illustrations and relation to the history of Chicago’s built environment offered rich possibilities for the kind of multimedia presentation and analysis at which the Web excels.
What’s more, the Chicago Historical Society and Art Institute of Chicago generously digitized crucial resources in their collections on or relating to the 1909 plan.
The interpretive digital essay about the Burnham plan evolving from the class will make use of primary sources from the plan itself to photographs, maps, documents, letters and illustrations relating to the plan and the development of Chicago.
For example, students are exploring a wealth of materials regarding the publicity of the plan, including meeting minutes of the Chicago Commercial Club, newspaper reports, Burnham's own speeches and the Wacker Manual of the Plan of Chicago which was required reading for school-aged students in the city’s public schools.
The online essay on the Burnham plan will include text, galleries of digitized primary source materials, and rich "electronic maps" or "cornerscapes" that could not take shape in print format. Dynamic maps, for example, will allow “digital readers” the opportunity to visually compare the recommendations of the 1909 plan with the realities of Chicago’s built environment today and at different periods over the last century.
“The most gratifying thing about the class is the extent to which the computer science and history students work together,” says Smith. Computer scientist Dennis agrees, admitting that at the course’s onset the professors tended to think about the students as two distinct and separate camps.
A self-described “technology wonk” who is interested in information dynamics on the Web, Dennis says he initially envisioned the class "as the geeky, tech types that think with their left brain versus the technology-averse, right-brained historians."
However, the students in “Using Technology, Making History” defy those stereotypes. Many of the computer science students show an interest in historical research while some of the historians turn out to have a sophisticated knowledge of computer technologies.
“The course opens each type of student to a different perspective on scholarship,” computer scientist Dennis explains. “Computer science students learn what it is to ‘do history.’ Students in the humanities get an introduction to new, very exciting ways of presenting historical arguments and documentation.”
“To participate in the class all we required of the history students was that they have a knowledge of word processing and the Internet,” says Smith. “We didn’t expect them to have fancy technology skills. Many have them, many learn them, but they don’t need them because they wind up working in small groups with students from both disciplines who combine their skills.”
Like the Chicago Historical Society and Art Institute, libraries, other museums and cultural institutions around the country also are making commitments to digitize collections. They are doing so not only with an eye to preservation but also with faith that scholars will be able to create valuable new practices from the close examination of primary source materials in a digital environment.
“Using Technology, Making History" is one step in defining those practices, according to Bob Taylor, director of Northwestern’s Academic Technologies. Taylor and his staff have been working with the Encyclopedia of Chicago online team at the Chicago Historical Society for more than two years.
At Northwestern, the professors and students in “Using Technology, Making History” have begun to view the alliance between computing and history as a natural extension of both disciplines that holds remarkable promise. Each field is invested in designing good "information architectures," organizations of content and technologies that will better enable people to make sense of historical information.
As the tools for authoring and publishing content directly through a Web browser improve, computer scientist Dennis envisions a future in which more primary materials are available on the Web and better technology tools exist for working with those materials. “I look forward to a time when amateur historians and history buffs may bring untold aspects of Chicago's rich history to light and tell the city's story in exciting new ways,” he says.
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