The Linnentown Project (website) is focused an African-American neighborhood close to the UGA campus that was destroyed to make room for student housing in the early 1960s. The map below shows the boundary of this historic neighborhood. The Community GIS in Spring 2020 partnered with this initiative to digitize and analyze records related to the community from UGA's special collections library and from the U.S. Census. More detail on this collaboration is found on this blog post, but also briefly summarized below.

Map credit: Dane Hulsey

Working from archival maps and satellite photos, students mapped parcel boundaries, homes, and streets related to the neighborhood, including information on property owners and residents. We used sketch mapping with former residents to capture details that were either inaccurate or missing in the archival records.

In addition, we digitized individual level records from the 1940 Census to better understand what the neighborhood was like in the years prior to its destruction. A Ph.D. student at University of Liverpool, Hope Bleasdale, helped analyze these data, and you can see her results on this page.

For their final projects, students created storymaps or dashboards based on the data we compiled over the semester. You can see presentations for selected projects (along with links to those maps) using the YouTube video playlist below--projects will play consecutively. Alternatively, here's the link to the playlist on YouTube and a list of final projects. You can also see reflections on the class on our blog from Aidan and Katrina.

You can also find slides from a talk on this project at the NACIS annual meeting below: