The SHAPE of Shaping San Francisco #1 -- Spring 1997

Welcome to the first edition of Shaping San Francisco’s quarterly newsletter. The project has grown to the point that we needmore ways to stay in touch with our network of supporters. If you have thisnewsletter, we consider you a supporter!

Shaping San Francisco is an experiment in community media and urbanhistory. Under the umbrella of the Bay Area Center for Art and Technology(BACAT), we have been developing an interactive, multimedia compute rprogram which explores the dynamics that have shaped the city. Shaping San Francisco provides a forum in which people from different backgrounds can share their understandings about how we got here--and where we should be going.

The project team consists of three part-time staff, 30 core volunteers (over 100 sometimes-volunteers), and 25 participating community organizations. Our role as organizers is to give as many people as we can the chance to interview living historical figures, dig through archives, tell the story of an issue they feel passionate about, scan old family photographs, o rtake part in the dozens of other ways they can uncover the city’shidden history.

Each quarter, we will try to publish an update on Shaping San Francisco,including one of our historical essays. We want to start sharing some of the excellent writing that is going into the program.

1997 is going to be a big year for us. Before it’s over, the first release of Shaping San Francisco will be on the streets. We’d like to use this first issue of our newsletter to review our progress during 1996, and lay out what to expect in the upcoming year.

Editorial Group

One of the most exciting events in the project’s evolution has been the coalescing of a functioning editorial group. During the summer and fall of 1996, we concentrated on broad policy issues in terms of the kind of writing we wanted to see. This led eventually to a set of writer’s guidelines, which we hope wil lmake it easier for new writers to mesh with the existing scope and style.

The editorial group has been the site of intense debates about historical methodology and communications theory. How can we convey meaningful, coherent themes in our presentation while at the same time revealing the study of history as an active, contestable process? How can we make the material accessible to people who don’t already care about history? What do we like from the existing set of multimedia products,and what communications problems remain unsolved? How can we best explain why a given strand of history is relevant for people today? With these and other questions, Shaping San Francisco is forging new ground.

Concretely, the most recent outcome of the editorial group’s work is a series of chapter outlines. Executive Director Chris Carlsson made these outlines realistic by developing chapter “memory budgets,” which define how much space can be devoted to each chapter, in terms of memory available on a CD-ROM. So far, chapter editors have finished outlines on the Castro (Will Roscoe), Women’s History (Elizabeth Sullivan), Jewish SF (Kate Shvetsky), Labor History (Chris Carlsson), and Literary SF (Marina Lazarra). It’s hard to stress what an advance it is to have people thinking proactively about what material should go into a section, instead of just being grateful for whatever comes in.

For 1997, we will continue to develop chapter outlines, but the primary focus has now shifted: we need to crank out the actual essays. The writers will be in high production gear for about the next 5 months, and the chapter editors will be working to bring in more material from community groups and interested San Franciscans.

Content

The first release of Shaping SF will contain 22 neighborhood chapters and 15 subject chapters. Some of these are pretty far along, while others need more work. In addition to the ongoing labors of the editorial group, we have had some exciting contributions from outside sources.

The California Historical Society has generously given us permission to excerpt or reprint some two dozen essays from California Histor ymagazine. Titles include “Democracy in Banking: The Bank of Italy and California’s Italians,” “The Chinese as Medical Scapegoats in San Francisco1870-1905,” and “Working to Prosperity: California’s New Deal Murals.”

The African-American Cultural and Historical Society has contributed historic photographs of San Francisco’s black community, going back to the turn of the century.

Also, Haight-Ashbury Community Radio has allowed us to sample from their San Francisco History documentary series, including not just the 7 finished shows, but all of their background material as well.

These recent content acquisitions complement the hundreds of other eyewitness accounts, interviews, stories, essays, photographs, and historic documents that people have contributed to the project.

Production Studio (Almost) Completed

We have now acquired the essential components of BACAT’s basic, but still high-quality, multimedia production studio. This includes 4 desktop multimedia development computers, a flatbed scanner, backup tape drives, a videocamera, microphones, a video capture board, a laptop demonstration computer, a multimedia authoring program, a relational database, and software to edit photographs, video clips, and sound tracks.

On our wish list, to increase BACAT’s production capacity, is a better scanner with slide capabilities; a portable, digital audio tapedeck; 3 new computer monitors; a faster modem; and a CD-ROM recording machine.

2nd Generation User Interface

Greg Williamson, Shaping SF’s lead programmer, has completed an overhaul of the underlying structure for accessing the computer program. The central piece of the new design is the navigational “toolbelt.” From the toolbelt, which is always visible on the screen, the user can switch between different metaphors that organize the information, such as the map of San Francisco neighborhoods, the table of contents, or the index. The toolbelt gives you a route to timelines, help menus, and a “bookmark” function that lets you mark pages to return to at a later time.

A new “library page” lets you see an overview of the entire program’s contents on one screen. And finally, the beginnings of a database search engine are in place, which will eventually let the user look up book references by title, publisher, or author; move from a book reference to the places in the program where the book was used; and search the entire contents for names, places, dates, or events.

A New Introduction

When you turn on Shaping San Francisco, whatyou now see is not a run-of-the-mill table of contents, but a fully-animated “welcome experience.” Yerba Buena Cove, based on an 1840 artist’s rendition, begins to fill up with houses and buildings, as a sparsely inhabited peninsula becomes one of the densest settlements on the continent. Photographs from the 1850s to the present flash onto the screen. A collage of faces takes shape over a satellite image of the city. You see film clips from mounted cameras — Thomas Edison’s visit to the Land’s End Rail Road, Market Street in 1901, a bicycle in Golden Gate Park. Meanwhile, a narrated script prepares you for what they are about to see. And finally, you are deposited in the middle of the program, with a set of options laid out before you, of directions you can explore in San Francisco’s unique and compelling history.

Jim Swanson, Shaping SF Animator and Graphic Artist, created this masterpiece. Jim has been the principal architect of some of the most interesting multimedia effects contained within Shaping SF. The “hindsight continuums,” for example, compare historical photographs of the city with contemporary photographs of the exact same location. The juxtapositions can be surprisingly clear tools for demonstrating how the physical environment of San Francisco has evolved over time.

Next on his project list will be a set of animated characters that serve asguides to pieces of the material.

Fundraising Program

1996 saw the start of a small, but growing, fundraising program headed up by Gabriel Metcalf. In presenting Shaping SF to potential funders, Gabriel has written budgets, researched foundations, developed a formal mission statement, and generally figured out how to articulate the unique potential of this project.

For 1997, we need to raise money to actually produce the program into a finished digital form, which is a much more capital-intensive part of the process than any of our work to date. And of course, the principal organizers, who are putting in 30-60 hours a week,would love to get paid.

We are looking for funders who, like us, see the urgency of bringing critical social and ecological history to a broad public. Over the nextyear, we want to raise more money in 3 directions at once: individual supporters, grants, and sales of the CD-ROM.

Here’s our pitch: please give what you can.

Public Presentations

Shaping SF had a packed program schedule this last year. We showed the program to the California Federation of Teachers,the Bay Area Labor History Workshop, the National Alliance of Media Arts Centers, the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, the Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council, the Alliance for Cultural Democracy, Artists’ Television Access, and dozens of other groups. Outside of these formal presentations, we gave demonstrations to over 400 people.

In 1997, we want to keep Chris and the other public speakers busy with more of the same. Public showings have been scheduled at the Fillmore Multimedia Conference (February 15), City College Labor Studies (February 19), the Open Forum  (March 13), andthe Anarchist Book Fair (March 29).

Towards the First Release

The ongoing work of engaging the people ofSan Francisco in an exploration of the city’s past will reach a new phase when we release the first edition to the world. As many of you know, we plan to distribute the program through several major channels of distribution: we want to publish a two-volume CD-ROM; we want to create a web-site where we can post historical essays on the internet; and we would like to begin installing kiosks in cultural institutions like museums and libraries. In addition, the companion volume of printed essays from City Lights Books is scheduled for release in October of 1997.

We are going to “close the book” on new content for the first edition CD-ROM in June of this year. At that point, we go into full-time programming mode, as we transmogrify the essays, photographs, interviews, historic documents, and movie clips into a new multimedia format.

Stay tuned! The moment of the first release is not the end, but rather, an escalation of our work. If we are successful, we will stir up debate and discussion — and generate a host of new threads to incorporate into future releases. We appreciate your support.