The University of Arkansas at Little Rock received more than $300,000 to create a map-based website that tracks urban renewal in Little Rock and how it has changed Little Rock since the Central High School desegregation in the 1950s.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) provided a $325,043 grant for the project, which will allow UA Little Rock to digitize material and integrate it into the website. The UA Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture (CAHC) will lead “Mapping Urban Fracture: Charting the Context and Consequence of the Little Rock Central Crisis Project,” with Dr. Deborah Baldwin serving as the principal investigator.
The three-year project is set to begin June 1, 2021.
Through the project, CACH will create a virtual collection of 700 reports and maps created after 1989. The website will feature digitized and geolocated maps, architectural drawings, reports and photographs.
Researchers will also aggregate digital products that chart Little Rock history through residential segregation, urban renewal, local elections and governance and more.
“One of the reasons we wanted to complete this project is to make our collections more accessible to a wide variety of people, and we believed integrating them into a multilayered map on a website would do that,” Baldwin said in a statement. “It is an opportunity for the university to pull together expertise in many different areas and focus them on a project that can inspire a lot of conversation about the development of this city.”
Multiple UA Little Rock departments will participate in the project, including the CRUX Lab, the Arkansas Institute for Economic Advancement, the Department of History, and IT Services.
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