digATL | The Digital Atlanta Portal

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,
  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-08/presenting-a-childish-ludacris-outkast-map-of-atlanta
• Rasool, Adnan. “Mapping Atlanta’s Rap Footprint.” Atlanta Studies, February 13, 2018, https://doi.org/10.18737/atls20180213
• “Student Creates Atlanta Rap Maps Featuring Childish Gambino, Other Stars,” https://news.gsu.edu/2019/05/08/student-creates-atlanta-rap-maps-featuring-childish-gambino-other-stars/

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.

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

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.

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.

Documents the history of radio broadcasting in the state of Georgia over a 50 year period from its inception in 1922 through the 1970s, including Atlanta stations WAOK, WAGA, WQXI, WSB, WKLS, and others. Content and materials included in this exhibit are from the Radio Broadcasting Collections housed in the GSU Library Special Collections and Archives and the Georgia Radio Hall of Fame collections. Originally created October 2013, coinciding with the Georgia Radio Hall of Fame’s 7th Annual Induction and Awards Ceremony.

Tells the story of the 1906 Race Riot, a three-day massacre that spread through Atlanta, starting downtown on Saturday, September 22 and ending with the arrest of hundreds of civilians on Tuesday, September 25. The tour, put together by undergraduate students in Georgia State University’s EPIC Project Lab, uses quotations from Veiled Visions: The 1906 Atlanta Race Riot and the Reshaping of American Race Relations by David Fort Godshalk (UNC Press, 2005), a book examining the long-last impact that the riot had on Atlanta and especially on its race relations. Law enforcement agents and government authorities failed dramatically to protect Atlanta’s marginalized and vulnerable citizens. Both the Atlanta Police Department and the Governor’s Mansion stood only a few minutes’ walk from Five Points, where the violence had erupted, yet the police and the governor failed to intervene significantly until lives had already been lost.

The purpose of this tour is to have students explore some of the locations on or near GSU’s campus in Raymond Andrews’ memoir Once Upon a Time in Atlanta (Chattahoochee Review, v18, n2, 1998) and to provide some information about the Sweet Auburn District, the setting for most of the memoir. The tour is not meant to be an official tour of the Sweet Auburn District.

Raymond Andrews came to Atlanta in 1949, when he was 15 years old, to attend high school and work. While he went to school and worked outside of the neighborhood, Andrews lived in Sweet Auburn. This area was often considered the wealthiest African American business district in the U.S. for much of the early to mid-twentieth century. Andrews was here during the area’s heyday. Sweet Auburn developed after the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre as black businesses moved out of the more integrated downtown area to avoid growing racial tensions during the rise of the Jim Crow era. For decades, the area was a prosperous foundation for African American business, culture, and leadership. The neighborhood played a significant role in the Civil Rights Movement, and is now home to many historic landmarks.

In the late twentieth century, the Sweet Auburn District faced many economic hardships after an interstate was built dividing the neighborhood, white flight to the suburbs, and the displacement of many African American neighborhoods by Urban Renewal. For the past few decades, the neighborhood has often been listed as one of the most endangered historic places in the country. As GSU grows, our campus has moved increasingly into Sweet Auburn.

Related resource
ATLMaps – https://atlmaps.org