Ivan Allen College Archive Project Receives Nearly $100,000 from NEH

The Ivan Allen Archive Project at the Georgia Institute of Technology has received a two-year, $99,991 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund the integration of large-scale text processing and data visualization capabilities into the open-source Omeka platform.

The grant, announced Jan. 14 by the NEH, will fund further refinement of an existing suite of plug-ins developed by Georgia Tech faculty and students that enables machine-assisted data analysis and social network graphing. The eventual goal is to release the extended toolkit for use by academic and community researchers free of charge.

“When completed, this tool will provide not just researchers, but communities themselves, with innovative methods for preserving and exploring history,” said Brad Rittenhouse, project director and coordinator of the Digital Integrative Liberal Arts Center (DILAC) in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication.

The Georgia Tech tool has been under development since 2016, with the papers of former Atlanta Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. serving as a test case. The late Allen, a 1933 graduate of Georgia Tech, served as mayor of Atlanta from 1962 to 1970 — an era of dramatic social and economic change for the city. The Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts is named for Allen, who provided pivotal testimony in Congress for what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964.