Shaping San Francisco pioneers a new approach to the study of our urban life: a participatory, social history of San Francisco, in the form of an interactive, multimedia computer program. The project has drawn on over 15,000 hours of volunteer time from writers, researchers, photographers, artists, computer programmers, community organizers, and, most importantly, regular people who were compelled by the chance to investigate some piece of this city's past. We incorporate feedback, criticism, and input into the next release, as people are moved to help make our collective understanding of San Francisco's past more complete.

Shaping San Francisco started gestating in late 1993 as the last issue of Processed World magazine (#32) was being completed. In n article called "The Shape of Truth to Come: New Media and Knowledge," Chris Carlsson explored the possiblilities and hype surrounding new forms of nonlinear media and how that might impact cognition. Though he drew largely negative conclusions, concluding that interactive multimedia was to entertainment as self-management was to work, the inquiry neverthless stimulated he and Greg Williamson and Jim Swanson to begin exploring what a digital lost history project might be.

For the first year we read about multimedia, learned other software skills (esp. Photoshop), had weekly meetings in which we sketched out preliminary structures for our effort. We called our project "Emperor Norton's Time-Travelling Dog and Bike Extravaganza," building on a concept of a bike messenger who got lost in time after a big earthquake struck.

We went through a lot of paper versions and wrote a bunch of articles, started preparing various animations, and puzzled over the problem of laying a traditionally linear game structure over a nonlinear jumble of intersecting historical threads. We tried to develop historical characters to serve as hosts, and we soon decided on our hardware and software platforms.

In early 1995 we finally began putting something together on computers. By now, we had changed our working name to "Wheels" and it was under this title that the first public appearance of our project took place. This was in Vancouver, B.C. at a conference called W.R.I.T.E. '95 (Writers Retreat on Interactive Technology and Equipment), where Chris Carlsson presented a public demonstration of the earliest version of the project. Of course it crashed after about 15 minutes, but it was nevertheless received with enthusiasm and encouragement by the other conference attendees.

By the end of the summer of 1995 we were recruiting friends and collaborators. We also received our first grant of $10,000 from the California Council for the Humanities. New material was being steadily added to the project. The labor and ecology chapters were growing rapidly, as was African-American, Literary San Francisco, Gay & Lesbian, Housing, and Transportation. Throughout that autumn we continued to try to develop game and hosting narratives, but after much anguish and literally hundreds of hours wasted on animations that never got used, we shelved the idea of a game and focused on making a compelling presentation of the historical material we were gathering. We also had to face upgrades to Windows and our authoring software that suddenly rendered Jim Swanson's work with Autodesk Animator useless. This was very demoralizing and set back the animation side of the project for a good while.

Throughout this time, Greg Williamson was wrestling with the intricacies of our design and the problems we had making Windows behave consistently (we NEVER achieved that!) and getting our authoring software to do what it claimed it would do.

Social and Ecological History

Our roots lie in the "new social history" which emerged in the 1960s as a way to go beyond the traditional history of "great men" which many of us were spoon-fed in public school. Chapters focus on the history of the labor movement, the relationship between urban development and the natural environment, racial politics in San Francisco, land use, the history of women and feminism, immigration from many parts of the world, the emergence of gay San Francisco, the artistic life of the city, and of course, the specific history of each neighborhood. We also explore the ways San Francisco's urban development has always depended on the transformation of the land and the Bay-Delta ecosystem.

By placing the history of everyday life at the center of broader historical processes, Shaping San Francisco will show that the people who are usually left out of the historical record were not passive victims, but instead, historical actors with their own hopes and agendas. The project seeks to underline some of the things that previous generations of people fought for and some of the reasons they succeeded or failed.

Participatory History

Most often, the process of "doing" history involves professors working alone, sorting through archives, and publishing their research in scholarly tomes. We believe that history can be a process that grows naturally from our desire to understand the world, and that history can be de-professionalized, made into a popular, grassroots process.

For example: A young Filipino interviews his grandmother about Kearny Street's Manilatown in the 1940s. A high school teacher collects photographs from the 1800s, documenting the spread of San Francisco's built environment over the land. College students in an American History class sort through the archives of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union to explore industrial automation in the mid-20th century.

While we rely on professional historians as advisors and excerpt from some of the fine history which has already been written, the focus of Shaping San Francisco is broad involvement. We encourage people to tell their own stories, and to uncover other episodes from this city's complex past. We work with individuals and existing organizations -- environmentalists, political groups, neighborhood associations, community centers, and historical societies -- seeking to bring out the historian in everyone.

Shaping San Francisco and history

Shaping San Francisco is both a contribution and a challenge to the field of history. We offer a wide range of histories here, some excerpted from professional histories, and many others taken from amateur sources. We have many examples of a traditional historical essay, fully footnoted, relying heavily on pre-existing documentation to establish the truth of its point of view. And we have a wide range of writings that are based on journalistic sources, anecdotes, and oral histories. The field of history, especially as taught in the universities of the United States, is a highly specialized field with a range of rules and expectations to help assure that what earns the name history has passed certain standards of truth and objectivity. This can be helpful, but it can also be terribly narrow. In response to the inadequacy of this self-regulating system, many new historians of the past few decades have sought to legitimize other sources and other voices as plausible evidence for understanding the past. Racial minorities, workers, the impoverished underclass, women, all have been overlooked in traditional histories, largely because the rules of history required that there be documentation as proof. But that is a highly class-biased and self-selective system of rules of evidence, which automatically excludes that large majority of the world's population who didn't--or weren't able--to record their histories in the past.

Shaping San Francisco brings forth perspectives and stories of those who haven't already defined our sense of this city's history. Some stories are only known thanks to prior historical and journalistic efforts, but it is our goal to uncover new perspectives and lost histories. Simultaneously, we are providing a delivery system for recording the history we are making together in San Francisco right now. You may be surprised to find things that happened quite recently, and even some things happening now whose ultimate impact on our lives is as yet unknown.

Shaping San Francisco is a good starting point for research and a unique forum for the sharing of history, but it will be best used in conjunction with a well-stocked library of books and periodicals. The makers of Shaping San Francisco do not support the absurd notion that digital media can supercede the book, which is still a solid, compelling medium by which people share knowledge. We are enormously dependent on books for the material weve assembled here. Moreover, we have produced a book alongside this effort, called Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture, a City Lights Anthology. (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books)