Author bios
Todd Presner is Professor of Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature at the University of California Los Angeles. He is the Chair of UCLA’s Digital Humanities Program and also the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the UCLA Center for Jewish Studies. With Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, and Jeffrey Schnapp, he is the co-author of Digital_Humanities (MIT Press, 2012). His collaborative research and teaching has been supported by the MacArthur Foundation/HASTAC, NEH, Mellon, and Google.
David Shepard (PhD, English, UCLA) is the Lead Academic Developer at the UCLA Center for Digital Humanities and a former Visiting Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2010, he and Presner received one of the inaugural Google Digital Humanities Awards for HyperCities GeoScribe, a tool for literary mapping. His current research examines event detection and tracking in social media, focusing on users’ behavior during crises.
Yoh Kawano is Campus GIS Coordinator at the Institute for Digital Research and Education and lecturer in the School of Public Affairs at the University of California, Los Angeles. Following the Great Tohoku Earthquake in Japan, Yoh has been busy researching the potential that the social web can have in post-disaster relief. In the inaugural TEDxUCLA event in 2011, he spoke of ways that locational technologies can provide immediate and real-time opportunities for crisis management.
Additional contributions in the form of “project windows” were composed by: Philip Ethingon, Mike Blockstein, Reanne Estrada, Chris Johanson, Diane Favro, and Xarene Eskandar.
Philip J. Ethington is Professor of History, Political Science, and Spatial Science in the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and Faculty Master of New Residential College, at the University of Southern California. He has recently finished an online+print global history of Los Angeles, Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles Since 13,000 (under consideration by UC Press). He is co-PI on both the HyperCities and Scalar open-source authoring platforms.
Mike Blockstein is a visual artist and educator and the Principal of Public Matters, a social enterprise that develops and implements long-term neighborhood-based media, education and civic engagement projects. Mike has created and led projects nationally, working with youth, community leaders and organizations to reflect on, understand and shape their physical, social and political geographies, including Market Makeovers, work on healthy food access, and PDub Productions in Los Angeles’ Historic Filipinotown.
Reanne Estrada is the Creative Director of Public Matters. A visual artist whose work addresses issues of identity, she combines her background in visual arts, including graphic design and media production, with social marketing and education to reach and engage focus populations, with an emphasis on resource-poor, low-income communities of color. She has produced media that have shown in museums, galleries and film festivals nationwide.
Chris Johanson is assistant professor of Classics and Digital Humanities at UCLA, associate director of the Experiential Technologies Center, and Director of RomeLab, a multi-disciplinary research group whose work uses the physical and virtual city of Rome as a point of departure to study the interrelationship between historical phenomena and the spaces and places of the ancient city.
Diane Favro is professor of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA, specializing in Roman architecture. She is co-director of UCLA’s Experiential Technologies Center and PI on Visualizing statues in the Late Antique Roman Forum and on Digital Karnak with Willeke Wendrich.
Xarene Eskandaris a researcher, designer and media artist with a diverse background ranging from fashion and automotive design to architecture and live visuals. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Design from University of Cincinnati, Department of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning, and MFA from Design Media Arts, UCLA