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Research Programs at the Bill Lane Center
The Bill Lane Center's sponsored research projects range widely in topic, discipline, and scope. They all are structured to approach the region in an interdisciplinary, transnational, and historically grounded way.
The Center sponsors work with both scholarly rigor and policy relevance, that engages debates within the academy and outside of it, and that speaks to the myriad concerns of the diverse regions and peoples of the North American West. Current research includes:
California Constitutional Reform
Superlatives abound in all discussions of California. It is the most populous and the most immigrant-rich state in the American union, among the world's largest economies, home to a globe-girdling entertainment industry, and a peerless engine of technological innovation. Less well known is the almost unsurpassed prolixity and complexity of California's Constitution. Originally ratified in 1879 and amended profligately since - especially through the initiative process - California's Constitution is now said to be the world's second-longest governing charter, exceed only by that of India.
The political system that has shaped and is shaped by California's constitutional system is now widely perceived to be badly broken. Opinion polls reveal that Californians hold their legislature and a succession of governors in historically low esteem. Behind those attitudes lie the sorry realities of uncompetitive electoral districts, rancorous and paralyzing partisanship, chronic budget crises, deteriorating educational, transportation, and energy infrastructures, huge unfunded liabilities for public employees, looming environmental catastrophes, and the threatened loss of economic competitiveness in the dynamic global economy. It is time, more than 120 years after California's last full-dress constitutional convention, to have a serious and sustained look at the constitutional structure that has led to this regrettable state of affairs.
The Bill Lane Center for the American West is in the process of organizing a multi-year project culminating in a mock California Constitutional Convention. For more information about this initiative, please contact Dr. Tammy Frisby .
The Spatial History Project at Stanford University
Is a part of the Bill Lane Center for the American West and is made possible by the generous funding of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The project brings together scholars working on projects at the intersection of geography and history using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in their research. While enthusiastic about GIS, which offers a common framework for this research, the Spatial History Project is gearing up to move beyond GIS, to create tools to harvest useful information from large heterogeneous datasets of maps, images, and texts, and create dynamic, interactive digital visualizations for analyzing and representing change over space and time.The overarching goal of the Spatial History Project is to create dynamic, interactive tools that can be used across the spectrum represented by these research projects-from economic and technological changes, to social and political changes, and changes in science and the environment-and bring them all together to enable the creation of new knowledge and understanding of historical change in space and time and the possibilities for our present and future that may be found in the past.
The project involves three principal research projects directed by history professors Richard White and Zephyr Frank and PhD candidate Jon Christensen. The project has hired a talented staff to set up and run a Spatial History Lab in Wallenberg Hall. The Spatial History Lab is managed by Erik Steiner, who comes to Stanford from the InfoGraphics Lab in the Department of Geography at the University of Oregon, where he has designed and developed numerous successful interactive GIS projects, including a digital version of the Atlas of Oregon, which information design guru Edward Tufte called "superb, ranking among the very best atlases ever."
Contact:
Spatial History Project
Bill Lane Center for the American West
Wallenberg Hall, 450 Serra Mall, Bldg 160, Rm 228
Stanford, CA 94305-2055
