Tags recognized by HyperCities in a KML file.

This diagram does not include elements that describe placemarks and folders, like “title”, but these should be interpreted correctly.

Please also note that the link, location, scale, and orientation tags only work if they are associated with a model, not a 2D object.

For an overview of this project, click on the YouTube link below:

To view the collection, click on the image below.  Depending on your screen width, you may want to “slide” the collection open by dragging the divider between the map and the narrative panel.  You can also switch between map, earth, and satellite view in HyperCities.

1. Create your snapshot. To do this, set up Hypercities exactly as you want it, then click on the snapshot button. Remember the number at the end of the URL that you’ll be given.

2. Open the object that you want to put the link to the snapshot inside. Click on the “HTML” button. This will display the HTML source code of the text in your object. Find the text you want the user to click on to display the snapshot. Just before the text, without leaving a space, enter the following:

<a snapshotid=”1234″>

Replace 1234 with the number you were given when you created the snapshot.

Just after the text, again without leaving a space, enter this: </a>

What you should end up with is something like the following:

<a snapshotid=”1234″>Click me to display the snapshot!</a>

3. Save your edits as normal. Now, when a user clicks on the link, they should be taken to the exact state you created. Clicking on the link again will take them back.

First, each citation must have a reference code unique within that particular piece of content. This code can be something as simple as ‘1′ for the first one, ‘2′ for the second, and so on, but the important thing is that they must be unique within the description of that particular object. You can reuse the same codes in different objects, even if they’re within the same collection. Codes are used to link the links (the piece of text you click on) to the text that is displayed in the window when it pops up. They can contain letters and numbers, but please avoid other characters or spaces.

Once you have your list of codes, you can begin to enter them. If the content is already in Hypercities, you enter it using the editor. You can also add them to a KML file if you’re planning to upload your collection as a KML file.

Using the edit window:

1) Open the edit window. Once it’s open, click on the HTML button. Your text should look different now, with a lot of codes you didn’t see before between greater-than and less-than characters. This is because you are now editing the HTML code that controls how your text is displayed.

2) Find the piece of text you would like the user to click on to display the footnote.

3) Just before this piece of text, without a space, insert the following code:

<citation ref=”refcode“>

Replace “refcode” with the code for this citation.

4) After the text the user will click on to display the citation, you must close the tag. Again, right after that text, enter the following text:

</citation>

Do this for all your citations.

5) At the very end of the document, you enter the text that will be displayed for each citation.

If not, what this means is that you need to create another list of all the text you want to create. Use the following template.

<CitationList> (This needs to appear before the first citation)

<citation ref=”refcode“>Here is the text to be displayed</citation>

<citation ref=”refcode2“>Here is the text to be displayed for your second footnote</citation>

(Put more citations here)

</CitationList> (This needs to appear after the last citation)

HTML is allowed within the <citation> elements, but don’t put anything else between the <CitationList> and the <citation> tags inside it.

If you know XML, we are creating a CitationList element with citation children that have “ref” attributes with the same refcodes that you used before. The text of these children will be what is displayed in the new window when the user clicks on the link.

Please note: the text that the user clicks on to display the citation will automatically appear blue, superscripted, and underlined. Do not apply these styles yourself. In fact, if you put a <sup> tag around the text, it will be double-superscripted.

If you’re uploading a KML file, just follow steps 2-5, and make sure these all of this appears in the CDATA section of the description element of each object. The CitationList must also appear inside the CDATA element at the end of it.

1. Outline your collection hierarchy.

While it’s easy to change the hierarchy once your items are already in Hypercities, creating the hierarchy first will save you some time. For our example, let’s suppose we’re working on a project called “The Programmer and the Author,” and we have four files, houseofleaves.kml, infinitejest.kml, whitenoise.kml, and neuromancer.kml. Let’s also suppose we want to have the following hierarchy:

• The Programmer and the Author
  • The 1980s
    • William Gibson, Neuromancer (neuromancer.kml)
    • Don DeLillo, White Noise (whitenoise.kml)
  • The 1990s
    • David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (infinitejest.kml)
    • Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves (houseofleaves.kml)

2. Create the top-level collection.

This is the “meta-collection.” Once you’re logged in, go to “My Profile” and click on “Create a New Collection.”

how to create a new collection

Fill in the required information. In this case, the collection is called “The Programmer and the Author.” This collection may not show up in Hypercities yet because it doesn’t have anything in it.

3. Create any subcollections that will contain more than one collection.

Collections with more than one collection should be the next thing you add. Click on “Create a New Collection” again and enter the appropriate name, e.g. “The 1980s.” Be sure when you do this to add the collection to the collection it will be inside on the “Add To …” tab.

Here, we would add “The 1980s” to “The Programmer and the Author.” Again, these collections may not show up in Collection List view (though they will show up in the Add To … tab) if they have nothing in them.

4. Upload the KML into the appropriate place.

Now is when the real fun begins. Once you have created the collections, upload your first KML file. Click on the Add Media button.

The bottom button is the “Import K ML” button. Click on this.

In the window that pops up, fill in the required information. You must fill in a title, but this will be ignored if a name is specified in the file.

Once you have entered the appropriate information on the first two tabs, click on the Add To tab. Put this in the appropriate collection. Here, we would be putting whitenoise.kml into “The 1980s.”

Click the “submit” button.

Repeat the process for all the files.

Helpful tips:

• Before uploading your files, check them by opening them in Google Earth. This will validate that your KML is correct. If there’s a problem, it will frequently give you a more accurate assessment of what is wrong than Hypercities.
• If you only want your sub-collections to appear as collections of the collection that contains them, be sure that the containing collection is the only collection checked in the “Add To …” tab. Otherwise, they will show up under any collections that have been checked.

The second video will teach you the basics of creating a map using Google My Maps.

The third video tells you how to add your Google My Map into HyperCities.

Split-screen view of Ghost Metropolis (right) with map of 1784-1846 Spanish-Mexican Rancho Land Grants (left) overlaid with a link to a community-created video of Historic Filipinotown (2009)

Composed by Philip Ethington (USC, History and Political Science), Ghost Metropolis is a global history of Los Angeles since earliest human habitation, written in narrative, non-academic prose, presented in print form as a hybrid of textual, cartographic, and photographic representation, in print, online (HyperCities), and public art formats. Ghost Metropolis is a 21^st-century “Atlas,” inspired by the Renaissance atlases of the 16^th and 17^th century, which are rich mixtures of typography, graphic arts, and of course cartography.How does a global metropolis come into being?  How can we see such an impossibly large and complex urban center—especially one that is so fragmented, so massive, socially diverse, economically variegated, and politically complex?

Click on the YouTube video below to preview this collection:

Ghost Metropolis seeks to make the complex past of Los Angeles visibly knowable, using a combination of narrative historical explanation and the graphical tools of cartography and photography.  The visual methods of the book enable a great compression of historical information in consumable forms; the narrative form draws on the vast and astonishing array of historical developments that have made Los Angeles a global city, from Franciscan missions to motion pictures to ICBMs.

The history of every metropolis is written in its streets. All human action takes and makes place.  The actions of countless individuals and many generations literally took place in Los Angeles, and made the place of Los Angeles across the centuries.  The “past” in my approach, is the set of all places made by human action.  History, therefore, is literally a map of these places.

But of course, not all places are physical.  We are embodied in sites but we are also sovereigns of infinite space—through our imaginations.  A major aspect of this study is its attempt to reveal the intersection between the imagined and the lived, as in Hollywood’s massive production of cinematic landscapes.  In Ghost Metropolis I try to demonstrate precisely how (and precisely where) lived and imagined places intersected.  I trace the specific footprints of power, race-ethnicity, class, and gender, as the embodied choreography of social practices (on global and local scales), on one hand, and as the imaginary landscapes of social consciousness that order the concrete collective phenomena of mass culture, economies, ideologies, law, and the state, on the other.  This book literally maps the history of Los Angeles as a readable network of (located) stories that begin in the late Pleistocene (circa 13,000 BP).

Ghost Metropolis makes the history of Los Angeles visible, through words, maps, and images.  The past is all around us, shaping our lives.  But it is invisible to most of us.  I have taken on the task of painting the ghost of our past, so that we can all confront it.  Much of this past has been good and positive, but too much has been terrible, unjust, and destructive.  My Ghost metaphor alludes to the overall goal of exorcising those ghosts, by creating a blueprint by which the deeply entangled roots of injustice can be identified and overcome.