The University of Arkansas at Little Rock has received a three-year, $325,043 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create a collection of digitized material integrated into a map-based website.
The project, which begins June 1, will track how urban renewal changed the city of Little Rock in the decades following the Central High School desegregation crisis. It will make historic materials available to the public for free as well.
The UA Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture will lead the project, “Mapping Urban Fracture: Charting the Context and Consequence of the Little Rock Central High Crisis Project.” The center’s director, Deborah Baldwin, associate provost of collections and archives, will serve as the principal investigator.
The project will create a virtual collection to include about 700 new reports and maps created after 1989; develop an access interface to research spatial segregation with meta and geospatial data; and create an aggregated collection of digital products that track the history of Little Rock through patterns of residential segregation, urban renewal, public school desegregation plans, and local elections and governance.
It will also develop methods that can be used nationally for describing place-based materials in ways that others can easily find.
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