Course Description
Introduces concept, process, and techniques for representing
historic cultural landscapes through writing, photography, hand
drawing, and digital graphic media. Provides training in reading
the landscape to use digital photography and Adobe Creative Suite
to document maps, site plans, and forms of landscape
documentation. Introduces GIS and GPS.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students:
All students are required to complete bio-cultural landscape
documentation readings and associated practice exercises, a
mid-term exam, and final project. Further, graduate students
will complete several exercises that build upon one another,
ultimately leading to a group final project. Graduate students
will additionally be required to lead two seminar reading
discussions and craft a paper advancing the body of knowledge
of historic landscape documentation addressing adaptive
management, resilience, and/or sustainability.
Athena Title
Document Cultural Landscapes
Equivalent Courses
Not open to students with credit in HIPR 4330 or HIPR 6330
Semester Course Offered
Offered fall and spring
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student learning Outcomes
- Appreciate the role of documentation in cultural landscape assessment and planning
- Recognize historic and cultural landscapes as complex systems of natural and cultural resources that are possible to document in a variety of ways
- Demonstrate an understanding of the range of documentation techniques that may be applied to cultural landscapes (e.g., written narratives, photographs, site plans/maps, measured drawings, plant lists, Geographic Information Systems)
- Demonstrate an understanding of the documentation standards used for the U.S. Historic American Landscape Survey
- Demonstrate an understanding of the U.S. National Park Service methodology for documenting cultural landscapes (e.g., CLI, CLR, National Register nominations)
- Demonstrate an understanding and ability to apply basic principles of graphic design and layout, as well as graphic conventions and symbiology to the documentation of historic landscapes
- Demonstrate the ability to read and understand maps, site plans, and landscape construction documents
- Demonstrate the ability to create basic site plans and measured drawings of landscape features
- As possible, develop an ability to use Adobe Creative Suite applications (e.g., Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign) to create landscape documents
- Participate in a community service learning project to develop a comprehensive documentation package for a historic site
Topical Outline
- A community service-learning project affords the opportunity to interact with real-world sites and issues, typically in the form of documenting (historic research, photography, mapping) of a community-valued site(s).
- Techniques for documenting, mapping, and representing historic cultural landscapes using hand-drawing and digital graphic media
- Introduction to types of landscape documentation and media
- Graphic conventions and symbiology for maps and landscape site plans
- Traditional methods of land surveying
- Traditional methods of creating measured drawings of landscapes
- Planting plans and plant lists
- Documentation standards for Historic American Landscapes Survey
- Mapping landscape features using Global Positioning System (GPS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology
- Mapping landscape features using Light Detection and Ranging technology
- Introduction to Adobe Creative Suite
- Principles of graphic design and layout
- Apply skills learned in course to a community service-learning documentation project
