digATL | The Digital Atlanta Portal

Digital tour of the rise and fall of the bawdy brothels that lined Downtown Atlanta’s Collins Street from the late 1800s to the early 1900s—showcasing tantalizing tidbits from newspapers, census records, city directories, property records, maps, and more from Georgia State University Library’s digital resources. Walk the streets (well, not like that!) and transport your imagination back to those bygone days when sin and Southern hospitality went hand in hand. Launched Spring 2022.

Related Content

• “Historic Harlots (Interview w/Mandy Swygart-Hobaugh),” Archive Atlanta Podcast with host Victoria Lemos, August 5, 2022
• Swygart-Hobaugh, Mandy, and Allison Stephens, “Sin in a Southern City: The Unearthed History of Atlanta’s Postbellum-to-Progressive-Era Prostitution Trade,” Atlanta Studies Symposium Presentation, May 6, 2022

Celebrating 50 years of hip-hop! The Rap Map visualizes metro Atlanta’s influence on hip-hop and hip-hop’s influence on the region over the last three decades. The Rap Map highlights the disconnect between the rapid pace of development in the city and its negligible impact on how hip hop music engages with the city’s geography. It is as if Atlanta’s economic renaissance skipped whole portions of the city and that is where hip hop in Atlanta was born. Project goals are to show the significance of music as a source for an aural history of cities and towns as well as to explore the symbiotic relationship between art and space.

The Rap Map is available through ATLMaps, https://atlmaps.org

Related Content

• Mock, Brentin, “Mapping Childish Gambino’s Atlanta.” Bloomberg, June 8, 2018
• Rasool, Adnan. “Mapping Atlanta’s Rap Footprint.” Atlanta Studies, February 13, 2018
• “Student Creates Atlanta Rap Maps Featuring Childish Gambino, Other Stars,” GSU News, May 8, 2019

During the 1970s, Georgia State University archaeologists conducted systematic excavations associated with the construction of the Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) rail lines. This project recovered the material remains of Atlanta’s past, and these materials represent the single most comprehensive archaeological collection of Atlanta’s history. In addition, the excavations themselves are among the pioneering projects of urban archaeology in the then nascent field of CRM (Cultural Resource Management). Thus, just the excavation archive, which is part of the collection, is invaluable for the history of archaeology in the US, especially the burgeoning new field of urban archaeology. The entire collection (440 medium-sized “banker” boxes housing over 100,000 artifacts and all the accompanying documentation and excavation archive) has recently been returned to GSU. Showcasing significant “moments” in the life of the city, including several Civil War sites associated with the Battle of Atlanta, the majority of the collection corresponds to the late 19th and early 20th century, the time of Atlanta’s rebirth as a major metropolitan area, the collection opens immense opportunities for faculty and student research and public education and outreach. Furthermore, it will facilitate interdisciplinary collaborations within GSU, as well as with other universities in the Atlanta-area for the curation, conservation, study, and exhibition of the artifacts and archive.

Related Content

• The Phoenix Lab, GSU Department of Anthropology
• Phoenix Project, GSU EPIC Program
• Wharton, Robin, “The Phoenix Project,” Atlanta Studies, June 22, 2016

GSU professor Taylor Shelton’s blog exploring all of Atlanta’s oddities and inequalities with maps. Issues covered are fundamentally about geography, about how places are the way they are and how they change over time and how all of that matters to the people that occupy those places. Atlanta is one of the most interesting and unique cities in the US, if not the world, but it’s also one that’s been chronically understudied relative to other large cities. Even if more were written about Atlanta on a consistent basis, the city’s rapid changes necessitate ever more investigation of what’s happening, where and why. Atlanta consistently has some of the highest levels of income inequality of any city or metro across the entire United States. And while the city had a reputation for being one of the most affordable large metros, the last several years have seen some of the most rapid housing price increases of anywhere across the country, with unchecked gentrification running rampant in some historically Black neighborhoods.

Digital collection of material related to city planning and urban development in Atlanta. The collection consists of city planning maps, city planning publications, demographic data, photographs depicting planning activities, oral histories, and aerial photographs. Much of the Planning Atlanta material was created by the City of Atlanta, the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC), and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Additionally, items from other agencies and entities, such as the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), are included. Planning Atlanta is a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) funded project and seeks to move beyond the traditional digital library model of simply providing digital equivalents of tangible objects. This city planning focused collection provides free and open access to digitally transformed, dynamic, and engaging content with the goal of enhancing this material for educational and research uses. Many items in the collection have been transformed into digital objects that can be engaged with and manipulated. 

Digital project that investigates the history of Georgia Avenue, which once served as an important commercial thoroughfare in the neighborhoods south of downtown Atlanta, and is now the southern edge of GSU’s campus. This interactive historical narrative rediscovers a neighborhood that was entirely replaced by urban renewal projects, and explains why Summerhill, and other “stadium neighborhoods” in Atlanta, were so thoroughly transformed over the course of the twentieth century. 

Beginning in 1960, the Atlanta sit-in movement took over the downtown area of the city. Follow this tour to see where student activists conducted their peaceful protests and sat down to stand up for what they believed in. You’ll learn about major players and events of the movement while visiting the actual sites where they happened. Historic photos and descriptions will help you see what the protestors saw and take you back to this time of energy and passion in Atlanta’s past. Created Spring 2019.

This digital collection contains digitized versions of items that are owned by the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library. Currently, the collection contains historical maps, dating from the 1850s to the 1980s, of Atlanta and the surrounding area. The maps were created by a variety of entities and for various purposes. More content is expected to be added to this collection in the future.

How water has shaped the city. Video tour with urban designer and author Hannah Palmer. Palmer’s writing explores the intersection of Southern stories and urban landscapes, and has appeared on CNN.com, Art Papers, Creative Loafing, and in masterplans for urban design projects around the world.

Related Content

• Palmer, Hannah. “The scent of water: Searching for hidden springs in downtown Atlanta
  Can we find and repurpose the downtown springs and creeks that have languished for generations under layers of asphalt?” Atlanta Magazine, February 3, 2023, https://www.atlantamagazine.com/great-reads/the-scent-of-water-searching-for-hidden-springs-in-downtown-atlanta/

The ATLMaps platform, a collaboration between Georgia State University and Emory University, combines archival maps, geospatial data visualization, and user contributed multimedia location pinpoints to promote investigation into any number of issues about Atlanta. While currently focused on one city to demonstrate the power of stacking thousands of layers of information on one place, this innovative online platform allows users to layer an increasing number of interdisciplinary data to address the complex issues that any city poses. The project looks to offer a framework that incorporates storytelling reliant on geospatial data and for normalizing input across a range of data sets about so that material can be cross-compared in novel ways, allowing users to make connections between seemingly unrelated data sources and ask questions that would not be apparent when only looking at one particular project. The ATLMaps project will also encourage knowledgeable members of the university and local communities to curate data on the site to demonstrate the possibilities for synthesizing material across projects and data types.

Complete list of ATLMaps contributors and past and present team members at https://atlmaps.org/about

A Community Interactive Digital Archive. Krog Street Tunnel is one of Atlanta’s premier destinations for street art, political communication, and a community bulletin board. Since the late 1960s, artists have added and subtracted new paintings, messages, and designs to its walls, effectively creating a rapidly changing archive of local cultural concerns. The tunnel and the walls connected to it on DeKalb Avenue and Wylie Street comprise a single living dynamic work of art that is a cultural center of Cabbagetown. As such, to understand the cultural composition of the town, it is important to not only examine the art but also the creatives who give the tunnel life. Given the ephemeral nature of the tunnel art and its historical significance to the city, Georgia State University’s EPIC program, an academic research initiative dedicated to providing students with the opportunities to work on public-facing projects, has assembled a team of professors, graduate students, and undergraduates to document and catalog Krog Street tunnel’s art. In addition to regularly scanning and archiving the community’s tunnel art and murals, we also plan to conduct interviews with artists, patrons, and members of the community. This collection will become the basis of a frequently updated online publicly accessible 3d digital archive. Launched in 2022.

Aims to both preserve this unintentional archive as it was before Manuel’s Tavern underwent renovations in 2015 and provide a platform through which one might learn more about the individual items in this archive and even contribute to the knowledge about them. This project is the result of a collaboration via the Atlanta Studies Network, Emory University’s Center for Digital Scholarship, Georgia State University’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and University Library, with additional contributions from the Savannah College of Art & Design in Atlanta and the Center for Public History at the University of West Georgia. While some archives are carefully curated by experts with clear intentions and institutional resources supporting their creation, other archives are unintentional and organic collections of materials that have gathered in a corner of a city like driftwood on the beach.  One such example of the later type of archive are the walls of Manuel’s Tavern, which over the past half century have slowly evolved into a record of the local established political left that inhabited that space; where a generation of cops, soldiers, and politicians—who believed in a more representative democracy—gathered to eat pork chops in a neighborhood occupied by immigrants, hippies, and punks. And to this day neighbors still treat it like an extra living room, where they come to watch elections or play chess. The project has received both local coverage (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, WABE, Creative Loafing, ArtsATL) as well as national coverage (New York Times). Note: All photographs, videos, and other materials hosted on this site are licensed CC BY NC.