The Great Speckled Bird and Atlanta Map Room
Date: August 7, 2018
Time: 7:00–9:00 p.m.
Location: Manuel’s Tavern
RSVP: https://www.facebook.com/events/2133119356729876/
Join us on Tuesday, August 7, at Manuel’s Tavern from 7–9 for the summer 2018 Atlanta Studies Meetup. These quarterly meetings showcase Atlanta-focused projects and bring together a group of folks interested in our city. We will provide a few snacks. Buy your own drinks.
For this event, we welcome Traci Drummond and Andy Reisinger to talk about their work on Georgia State’s digital collection related to the legendary local underground newspaper The Great Speckled Bird as well as Yanni Loukissas, who will discuss the current mapping project he is helping coordinate at Georgia Tech.
The Great Speckled Bird
Traci Drummond and Andy Reisinger, Georgia State University
Atlanta’s alternative newspaper from 1968-1976, The Great Speckled Bird provided information about the interlocking and interdependent social movements of the 60s and 70s, including civil rights, women’s liberation, lesbian and gay liberation, and anti-war activism. The paper also focused attention on subjects largely uncovered by the mainstream media: police brutality, urban development, public education, labor, the environment, the counterculture, local arts and entertainment, and local and international politics. Traci and Andy will discuss the history of The Bird, the origins and evolution of Georgia State’s digitization and oral history projects to preserve and document the history of the Bird, the community-based collaboration of these projects, and things they’ve learned about the paper, the people involved in producing the paper, and the history of Atlanta during the 1960s and 1970s through these projects.
Atlanta Map Room
Yanni Loukissas, Georgia Tech
The Atlanta Map Room is a public space for creating interpretive maps of the city, from a combination of contemporary data, historical documents, and personal experiences. These maps are large-scale physical artifacts, collaboratively-made, and meant for exhibition. The Atlanta Map Room builds upon the recent success of the St. Louis Map Room, a project lead by artist Jer Thorp in conjunction with the Center of Creative Arts. The Atlanta team is collaborating with Thorp to develop a unique iteration of the project in Atlanta, meant to explore invisible tensions in the city, between its rapid development as a commercial hub and its long history as a center for civil rights and culture in the Southeast. The overarching goal of the Atlanta Map Room is to investigate what it means to visualize civic dialog around data. How can the seemingly mundane details of property tax assessments, building permits, and community surveys become the source materials for acts of collaborative creative expression?
The Plan:
7:00 – Grab some snacks (we will provide a few) and order a drink (that’s on you)
7:15 – Presentations and Q&A
8:30 – Networking, chit chatting, order another drink
