The first in a series of six remote Methods Workshops for the Urban Humanities 2020-21 cohort, the thick mapping workshop invited student groups to explore one of the seven Los Angeles ecologies (as defined in the UHI Fall 2020 curriculum) through the creation of a “thick map,” a temporally layered, multimodal/multimedia, cartographic representation. Over the course of one day, the cohort collectively utilized the Miro platform to create their thick maps. Students chose a specific social/cultural/spatial moment as the point of the departure. The resulting thick maps include basic hard data (demographics, socio-economics, climate, etc.), “soft” data (a newspaper article, fictional novel, visual/graphic signage, etc.), artwork, still images of films, and other type of creative expression that relate to the selected spatial moment. These spatial moments all take different forms and include events, experiences, or conditions that occurred within the ecology. The result of the workshop are thick maps which oscillate between the real and visible, imaginary and/or representational, something hidden, overlooked or distorted, or something that exists between the real and the fictional.
