About Exploring LA Through the Dunitz Mural Collection Digital Map Edition

This digital map edition shares essays written by students that engage with the Robin Dunitz archive and critically explore Los Angeles neighborhoods. Students utilize the Dunitz archive, both the photographs that are available online via the USC Digital Library as well as the accompanying archival materials that are housed at USC’s AFA Library. They then make site visits throughout Los Angeles to better understand the neighborhoods in which the murals exist. Lastly, the write critical essays about how these murals engage with the neighborhood, addressing various themes, including gentrification, access to housing, access to food, healthy, homelessness, and others.

The project utilizes GitHub as the main platform that delivers a simple interactive map environment with a dedicated space for sharing an essay. Essays are made of text, images, a bibliography, and a generated citation so that other researchers can easily cite each written essay. All the content of the website is freely available via a GitHub repository. The project builds on the mapping platform Flaneur and is partially inspired by similar mapping projects, Lyrical Map and Barrio Suburbanism.