The Project

 

City Sites is an innovative web-based multimedia research collaboration that explores the meanings and forms of American urbanism in New York and Chicago in the modern period.

 
     
 
     

The project is at the centre of 3-Cities project, a six-year research project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board and based at the Universities of Birmingham and Nottingham. It seeks to foster new modes of analysing American urban culture as well as developing a network of international scholars working on US urbanism.

  
       
  The Web Site  

Ten multimedia essays have been written and are being published on the City Sites web-site by the University of Birmingham Press in October 2000.

The essays are illustrated with interactive graphics and are linked together to form an intricate structure. The reader is encouraged to follow different pathways through the media.

  
 
         
     

The texts have beeen written by ten UK, American and European authors and collected by the editors, Maria Balshaw, Anna Notaro, Liam Kennedy and Douglas Tallack. They have been converted to HTML format by Mike Beilby and Suzanne Wright.

  
         
      The URL for the site is  
       
         
     

One of the essays, 'The Rhetoric of Space: Jacob Riis and New York City's Lower East Side' by Douglas Tallack has been awarded the Arthur Miller prize.

 
         
   

The project funding has supported the collaboration of the authors and the collection of materials. The two participating universities have provided resources for the construction and operation of the web-site.

  
       
  Technical  

Initially, the essays were prepared in Word format, and were transferred to the web-site amidst graphics and video.

The texts form an electonic book and are illustrated using DHTML, Javascript, Java applets and movies displayed using a Macromedia Flash plugin.