MAPS AS STORIES How do you capture the story of a city? Media artist Kristy H.A. Kang MFA ’97, PhD ’13 did it through the website “Seoul of Los Angeles,” her interactive doctoral dissertation project that documents the diverse ethnic community in LA’s Koreatown. Kang, who serves as associate director of USC Price’s SLAB and teaches at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, adapted Google maps by overlaying boundary lines that tell the history of Koreatown and its people through archival pictures, videos and snippets of audio. “The perception is that Koreatown and other different ethnic neighborhoods scattered around the city are homogeneous entities,
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but that’s not the case,” Kang says. For example, 58 percent of Koreatown residents are Latino, and large communities of Bangladeshis and Salvadorans settled in the area—a tidbit that users discover as they stroll through her site. And more stories are coming. Earlier this year, Annette Kim—SLAB’s founder and director—and her colleagues began mining official city documents, such as approvals for signs like “Little Ethiopia” or “Thai Town,” to map LA’s ethnic communities. They’re using U.S. Census Bureau data too. The efforts are all part of SLAB’s philosophy of using maps to understand the world beyond census tracts and city limits. “It’s a way of thinking about your space differently and being autumn 2015