digATL | The Digital Atlanta Portal

Georgia State University students map Atlanta’s past. This website is produced by Dr. Marni Davis and her students at the downtown Atlanta campus of Georgia State University. GSU has been part of downtown Atlanta since 1913, when it was founded to offer evening courses in business and commerce. As GSU grew, so did its presence in the city. Today, GSU’s downtown campus includes historic buildings and neighborhoods, brand new buildings and public space, urban renewal project areas, and an Olympic stadium. But cities are always built on top of history. What was here before GSU’s campus as we know it? If the past is invisible to us at street level, how can we make it visible?

Within Georgia State University Library’s digital collections can be found a series of approximately 100 photographs depicting downtown Atlanta streets in 1927, focusing mainly on the area just south of GSU’s present-day downtown campus. These images were scanned from glass plate negatives owned by the Special Collections of the Atlanta-Fulton Public Library System, which were loaned to GSU Library so that they could be digitized and shared with a wider audience. Of particular interest are images of city streets and storefronts at street level before many were covered over to make way for the “twin viaducts” project of 1927-1929, the city project that elevated the street levels of Central Avenue and Pryor Street (the viaducts) running north to south as well as Alabama and Wall Streets (the laterals) running east to west. This project quite literally entombed the original ground-level streets and storefronts below to become what we now know as Underground Atlanta. Thanks to this unique collection of images, we can return to downtown Atlanta before the construction of these viaducts and elevated streets.

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.

This student project allows users to experience Atlanta as it was in the 1920s, including many historically accurate buildings modeled from photos taken at the time. The virtual environment introduces users to many of the historically significant buildings that stood before parking lots came to dominate Atlanta’s downtown.

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

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.

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.

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.