Urban Archives news, events & projects

Summer 2008 - Students at SMU create Visual Essays about Olympia and Lacey, WA in Google MyMaps and Flickr.

March 2008 -- Urban Archives @ iSchool Research Conversation

iSchool web calendar
[Link to the iSchool's events calendar]

Giorgia and Tom presented the Urban Archives project at the Information School's Research Conversation, a colloquium and discussion. The presentation addressed our project's multiple aspects: a teaching tool, a resource and vehicle for research, a repository of public memory, and an interdisciplinary collaboration and technology.

Some questions that we addressed: How can researchers and scholars across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and information technology fields enable better productive and generative forms of collaboration? How can these collaborations involve and engage non-academic as well as academic communities of inquiry? What forms of professional and institutional development are necessary to support and sustain such generative cross-sectoral collaborations?

Fall 2007 -- New article about Seattle's Pike Place Market

Download a PDF of the article by Giorgia and Irina published in the latest issue of Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change.

Catalyst Spark Session on Student-Created Digital Content in UW Courses

Thursday, November 1, 2007
3:00 - 4:30 p.m.
Odegaard Library, Room 220

Tom and Giorgia will join a panel of UW instructors to discuss how we have incorporated student-created content into the learning experience.

Spark discussion and presentation points will address:

* What was the creation process, and how was this process integrated into the course(s)?
* How was the digital content used in the course and thereafter?
* How did the creation process improve student learning and contribute to desired learning outcomes?

KUOW decodes the writing on the wall

Irina appeared on local public radio station KUOW's Weekday program, hosted by Steve Scher. Previously, Weekday producer David Hyde took a walking tour of University District graffiti with the Urban Archives.

Listen to the program in MP3 or RealAudio.

KUOW web page clip

New Search page for Digital Collections!

During the Spring Quarter of 2007, Jessie Shulman, an Informatics major at the UW's Information School worked with us to research, design, and implement a new, custom interface to search our Digital Collections housed at the University of Washington Libraries. Check out this new feature here or click on the Search button in the navigation bar at the top right corner.

Thank you, Jessie, for your excellent work!

Spring 2007 -- Experiments with technology

This quarter students researched the histories of Seattle's Central District

mapping names of CD

One project, for example, focused on the history of the the people whose names were used in naming the parks and streets in Seattle's Central District. Communication senior Jordan M. Tanasse conducted archival research, took photogrpahs and mapped the stories and images in Google's MyMaps.

In another project, senior Deisree Wilson researched the history of Central District's parks and organized her images for the project in Flickr.

Pratt parks

We have also continued to build an annotaded bibliography on our wiki.

Seattle Times explores the meaning of graffiti

by Richard Seven, March 18, 2007

FREMONT BUSTLES at its odd Bohemian-yuppie pace, but Tom Dobrowolsky, a University of Washington graduate student rapt by how we communicate in, and with, public space, stops to regard a metal door. Set back in a foot-deep alcove, it has become a temporary bulletin board, a chat room of sorts, of spray-painted scribbles we call graffiti tags.

These marks can't be confused with graffiti art. They are labels, brands, and unreadable to those outside the subculture. It's a private conversation in public, like that cellphone yakker on the bus.

Who left marks on the door? Which came first? Do they reply directly to one another? Are they part of the same group? How long have they been there, and why are they still?

"The city is a library," says Dobrowolsky, who co-directs the UW's Urban Archives project, which catalogs examples of ephemeral street communication...

February 2007 Annual Convention of Western States Communication Association in Seattle

Seattle University Professor of Communication Mara Adelman, editor of Pike Place Market News Megan Lee and Urban Archivists Irina Gendelman and Giorgia Aiello participated in a panel about Pike Place Market (one of the most iconic sites of the city of Seattle) at the WSCA's annual conference in Seattle.

Giorgia and Irina presented their research about The Pike Place Market as a subject of representation in institutional (travel guides) and popular (personal tourist photography) narratives about the market. Great discussion followed about commodification of authenticity, markets as vital spaces, collective memory, historical landmarks and the future of public spaces.

travel guide cover page ... pike place fish

Urban Archives at October Conferences

Giorgia and Irina held a panel on working with undergraduates as research collaborators at the 2006 POD Network Conference in Portland, on October 26th.

Tom presented an audiovisual display of the Urban Archives at the Diversity Research Institute's first annual conference, Place Matters: Seeking Equity in a Diverse Society on October 27-28, 2006 at the UW.

Photo: Urban Archives exhibit; click to enlarge

Featured in the Daily

Photo by Ethan Welty

What we did this summer

We collected images in the Czech Republic, Germany, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Paris and Russia! New data is being edited and will be added to the Digital Collections shortly.

Photo: Graffiti in St. Petersburg, Russia one week before the G8 Summit. On rollover: Graffiti in Prague, Czech Republic.

Research Accomplishments & Awards

Undergraduates Nara Barrows, Arin Delaney, Edith Fikes and Ingrid Haftel won the 2006 UW Library Research Award for their project, Aurora Avenue: Highway Culture in Transition. This project was a collaboration between Urban Archives and CHID 270 Photography: Theoretical Reflections and Ethnographic Applications.
Emily Fischer and Sarah Rosenfeld finished their collaborative Communication Honors Thesis titled Graffiti and Public Space: A Semiotic Analysis of Graffiti in Seattle's University District. This is the first Honors Thesis originating from Urban Archives. Sarah and Emily contributed many images to the database and used them in their compelling analysis.

Congratulations to all our smart and inspired students. We're proud of you!!

Spring 2006, Completed Projects

Photo: Spring project presenations. Ashley presents her poster on graffiti. On rollover: Thera and Annaliese present their work on tourism in Fremont.

Graffiti
Identity and storefronts
Car as a medium
Seattle skyscape
Visual representation of bike culture
Fremont and imagery of tourism
Coleman School and competing discourses
May 1, Immigrant March in Seattle

Working with the community..

April 25th UA presented at the 2006 UW Teaching and Learning Symposium.

April 8th , UA collaborated with the Americorps Young Heroes project. Together with their 9-13 year old participants, we hunted for visual elements of cultural identity in Seattle streets.

Photo: Particpants in the collaboration between Urban Archives and the Americorps Young Heroes project.

Winter 2006...

We completed our Winter Quarter data collection on the following topics:

Aurora signs: highway culture in the city. History and aesthetics.
Political graffiti around the world.
Competing discourses and historic preservation (Coleman School).
Post smoking ban: will public spaces change?
Today's Seattle places in old archival photographs.
Ghost signs

Dec 2005: Digital Collection goes online!

We have begun to make our research data available through the University of Washington Libraries' Digital Collections.

To learn more about the Urban Archives, please click the About and Projects tabs at the top of this page. You can also search our digital collections for photographs and media.