Todd Presner
From InterSciWiki
Todd Presner is the author of two books: Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) and Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (London: Routledge Curzon, 2007). He is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, of Germanic Languages, Comparative Literature, and Jewish Studies. He teaches classes on modern Germany and intellectual history, including the cultural and urban history of Berlin, the Holocaust in literature and film, as well as classes on media studies and digital humanities. Personal Website: http://www.germanic.ucla.edu/faculty/presner.
He gave a fall 2008 videoconference on Hypercities for the multicampus complexity videoconference.
Presner is the Founder and Principal Investigator of the HyperCities project and the co-Principal Investigator of UCLA's new Keck Program in Digital Cultural Mapping. He received the 2006 Copenhaver Teaching with Technology Award at UCLA. In 2008, he won a MacArthur "Digital Media and Learning" award for the HyperCities project. HyperCities (http://www.hypercities.com) is a collaborative learning platform that augments the space and time of the physical world with the information web and renders the experience of the World Wide Web geographic and temporal.
Awarded one of the first "digital media and learning" prizes by the MacArthur Foundation/HASTAC in 2008 (http://hub.dmlcompetition.net), HyperCities is an unprecedented collaboration between universities, community partners, and cultural institutions to develop innovative teaching tools, technologies, and partnerships in the burgeoning field of digital cultural mapping. HyperCities represents the culmination of over ten years of work in establishing best-practices, technological prototypes, and award-winning geo-historical content for these cities. Born out of Web 2.0 technologies (particularly, the Google Maps API and social networking) , HyperCities represents a new educational environment that links generations and knowledge communities, mobilizing an array of technologies (from GPS-enabled cell phones to GIS mapping tools and geo-temporal databases) to pioneer a truly participatory, open-ended learning ecology in which digital information is connected with the physical world. HyperCities is a collaborative learning platform in which users "browse" cities by drilling down through time, make new discoveries as they move through space, and animate the ever-growing repositories of cultural memory.
