When Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles (SoLA) Archive arrived at the Getty Research Institute in 2012, its unique nature—its enormous size, vast scale, and material form—was such that Getty’s archival and technical teams had to employ innovative computational approaches to process it and make it accessible to researchers. The archive, a historic photographic record of L.A. from 1965 until 2010, continues to grow as Ruscha and his team photograph the city’s streets in an ongoing campaign to document the physical and cultural evolution of Los Angeles.
This section features a detailed narrative history of Ruscha’s project; an examination of Getty’s technological approaches to digitization and information management; and original data visualizations (see “You Are Here: Locating the SoLA Archive,” “Description as Data: What the Tags See in the SoLA Archive,” “Place as Data: What Geolocation Can Tell Us,” and “The Limits of Data: 10 Banks, a Few Rivers, and Some Snow,” this volume). By viewing the Streets of Los Angeles Archive in its full scope, these essays offer meaningful context for the publication’s four key themes: Artist, Image, Archive, and City.