digATL | The Digital Atlanta Portal

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.

Online exhibit feature photographs and negatives from Georgia State University’s Special Collections and Archives, consisting of images from six photographic collecting areas: Lane Brothers Commercial Photographers, Tracy W. O’Neal, Ernest G. Welch, Tom Coffin, David Lennox, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Photographic Archives. These visual treasures document daily life in Atlanta and the region during the twentieth century. This exhibit explores several different types of photography, from commercial to photojournalism, and the challenges of preserving a variety of photographic prints, negatives and born-digital materials of ever-changing technological formats. Over time, these unique images deteriorate, endangering our ability to provide access to the unique information about the many facets of public and private life as well as the built environment and natural world that only a photograph can provide. The physical exhibit was on display at Georgia State University’s Library Special Collections and Archives department from September 23, 2018–July 1, 2019.

Recorded stories from Dr. John Burrison, Folklorist and Professor of English at Georgia State University, who has collected stories of folk music, pottery, legends, medicine, and religious practices in Atlanta. This walking tour will guide you through folk sites downtown, specifically around locations which now make up today’s GSU campus. This project was developed under the guidance of Dr. Brennan Collins for the Student Innovation Fellowship program at Georgia State University, Spring 2019.

The Great Speckled Bird was one of several underground newspapers that appeared in the United States in the 1960s. Published in Atlanta from 1968 to 1976, The Bird, as it was commonly known, was a new, radical voice from the South. The Bird stood out among the alternative press for the quality of its writing, its cover art and its fearless opinions and reporting on a range of topics—national and local politics, the counterculture, women’s issues, gay liberation, reproductive choice, music, art, and more. This Digital Collection includes items from the following collections: all issues of The Great Speckled Bird, including revival issues from 1984-1985 and 2006, digitized from physical copies in The Southern Labor Periodicals Collection; interviews with former staff members of the underground newspaper taken from The Great Speckled Bird Oral History Project Collection; images of Atlanta and its people from the Tom Coffin Photographic Collection. Coffin, a founding member of The Great Speckled Bird and life-long photographer, supplemented his work on the paper with photographs of the counter-culture in the 1960s and 1970s.

The exhibit commemorates the 50th anniversary of the publication of the first issue of The Great Speckled Bird. Content in this exhibit incorporates resources from Special Collections and Archives’ Digital Collections at the Georgia State University Library. The Great Speckled Bird (1968-1976) launched in 1968, a year of protests and political contestation around the globe. In Atlanta, the founders of the paper felt it necessary to create an outlet for news that presented a point of view unavailable in the city’s other media platforms. The Bird served as a clearinghouse for information about and as a call to action for the interconnected social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, including civil rights, anti-Vietnam War activism, and women’s and lesbian and gay liberation. The paper also focused attention on subjects and news largely ignored or selectively covered by the city’s mainstream news media.

Highlights aspects of Atlanta’s LGBTQ+ history that are most fully documented by GSU Archives & Special Collections. The Gender and Sexuality Collections at Georgia State University have grown rapidly since the first donation in 2011. Currently, the manuscript collections measure over 550 linear feet. An extensive periodical collection with over 670 titles includes more than 8,700 individual items, and almost 3,000 books have been donated. Further, 110 oral histories have been conducted by GSU staff and volunteers and 46 interviews have been donated by others.

Creative Loafing is an alternative newspaper covering arts, entertainment, music, news, and politics in metro Atlanta. The paper was founded in 1972 by Deborah and Elton (Chick) Eason and expanded to other cities in the 1980s and 1990s under Creative Loafing, Inc. It went through various ownerships, starting in 2009, before being purchased by Ben Eason, son of the founders, bringing the publication back to the family as Creative Loafing, LLC, in 2017. Creative Loafing Inc. was once the nation’s second-largest publisher of alternative weeklies. Creative Loafing continues to be published online as a regularly updated website, with special print editions published occasionally throughout the year. This Digital Collection currently includes all issues of Creative Loafing published between the inaugural issue of June 3, 1972 and October 1973. Additional issues will be added on an ongoing basis.

Founded in 1913, Georgia State University grew as it supported the educational needs of Atlanta and the state of Georgia. Originally an evening program intended for the Atlanta business community, the school achieved university status in 1969. With this new phase of academic growth, the administration focused on expanding the University Library’s ability to support advanced research. The Library’s Special Collections and Archives launched formally in 1971, with the mission of collecting rare and unique primary source material to support teaching and scholarship. Our first collections directly engaged the research needs of our faculty and students focusing on the people, communities, and events that shaped modern-day Atlanta, Georgia, and the New South. This focus on documenting the sometimes contentious, too often racist and sexist, but always fascinating story of modern-day Atlanta has led us to seek out and preserve the stories of everyday people. The stories maintained in our archives are not just of the powerful and famous, they are the stories of everyday people who recognized injustice and organized their peers, family, coworkers, and lives around rectifying that injustice and making Atlanta a more equitable city. Fifty years ago, our collections started with one box and a single collecting focus on southern labor unions. As our collecting areas have grown from one to nine, so has the department. Today our collecting areas — Southern Labor, Photographs, Women’s, Gender & Sexuality, Music & Radio Broadcasting, Social Change, Rare Books, Pulp Literature, and University Archives — consist of 8 miles of materials and several terabytes of digital content. Georgia State’s Special Collections & Archives gives researchers an in-depth view of life in 20th and 21st Century Atlanta and the Greater Southeast Region. This expansion of collecting has been possible only through creating connections to passionately engaged community partners. From the LGBTQ Institute and We Love BuHi to the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the AFL-CIO, Special Collections builds relationships with communities all over Atlanta and the South. The collections entrusted to us document the stories, accomplishments, and struggles of those communities. Bridging Communities introduces a few stories found in our collections, such as the women who organized domestic workers for basic work protections; a woman who recognized a need to support families of incarcerated mothers; a sanitation workers’ strike protesting continued discrimination in hiring and promotions, poor working conditions, and low pay; women fighting for equal rights; the University’s struggle with racial tensions on campus; a grassroots campaign to retain the musical director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra; and organizations working to assist the homeless and other marginalized groups. This exhibit is a testament to the important role archives play within the communities they serve.

Granite, limestone, and marble building stones are found in a 20-block area that is centered around the beginning of Peachtree Street. These three commercial types encompass a much greater range of rocks. Granite, limestone, marble, travertine, dolomite, serpentine, larvakite, gabbro, and gneiss are among the rock types found within the 50 varieties of commercial building stones used in the area. A map has been prepared of the area and specific sites of geological interest have been identified. The building name is given in the descriptions of the buildings and rocks found in the area so that they may be located easily. Only the three commercial rocks names will be used in the tour so that one can look at the rock samples and try to determine their true nature. The tour originates at Georgia State University, 33 Gilmer Street, Atlanta, GA. Walking tour created by Dr. Bob Power, former GSU professor in Geosciences. Revised by Dr. Hassan Ali Babaie, GSU Associate Professor of Geosciences.

Black Neighborhoods and the Creation of Black Atlanta explores the history of Black neighborhoods in Atlanta. It provides an overview of several of these neighborhoods: Summerhill, Vine City, West End, Lightning, and Johnsontown. The exhibit highlights archival collections held in the Archives Research Center at the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library. Collections include the Maynard Jackson Mayoral Administrative records, the Atlanta Urban League papers, the Atlanta Community Relations Commission collection, the Grace Towns Hamilton papers, the Neighborhood Union collection, the John H. Calhoun, Jr. papers, the Samuel W. Williams papers, the Atlanta Neighborhood Planning vertical file, the Johnsontown Neighborhood collection, and the Vivian W. Henderson papers. Exhibit created by Brittany Newberry.

Focused on suburban residential developments in DeKalb County, Georgia between the end of World War II and 1970 in order to better understand the transformation of the area after the Second World War. The resource includes data on national residential trends, architectural and landscape designs, as well as information on metropolitan Atlanta. The resource was created to support the effort to preserve local neighborhoods, buildings, and landmarks by providing the historic context in which they were created.

Date created

Spring 2010