In February 2026, Southern Spaces launched Trouble the Land: A Personal History of the Civil Rights Movement in Five Southern Cities a series of multi-media presentations exploring the local character of the civil rights movement through the voices of those who lived it. The series, which covers Atlanta, GA, Montgomery, AL, Columbia, SC, Jackson, MS, and Little Rock, AR, is a transformation of the 1997 Peabody Award-winning audio documentary Will the Circle Be Unbroken? produced by the Southern Regional Council (SRC) and distributed by Public Radio International (PRI). Trouble the Land pairs Will the Circle Be Unbroken’s audio, archived in Emory’s Rose Library, (without popular music excerpts) with an enhanced transcript featuring curated photographs, video, archival images, original maps, informational text links, and recommended resources. Through Trouble the Land, Southern Spaces seeks to stimulate critical discussion about the civil rights movement and the process of societal transformation among scholars, activists, educators, students, and the general public. This series, containing as many as twenty-four articles, will be published throughout 2026.
In 2025, the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship produced a detailed 3D reconstruction of the Veloz, a Brazilian slave ship, as part of its continued work on the SlaveVoyages project. The reconstruction is based on a drawing published in Robert Walsh’s Notices of Brazil in 1828 and 1829, a rare visual diagram of a slave ship operating in the South Atlantic. By translating this historical source into a digital 3D model, ECDS is helping to make visible an important but less commonly represented dimension of the transatlantic slave trade.
This work is being developed in collaboration with Professor Adriene Baron Tacla at Universidade Federal Fluminense in Brazil. Professor Tacla is part of a digital humanities research team of historians and computer scientists creating a mixed reality experience for public outreach about the slave trade and the experiences of enslaved people in Rio de Janeiro around 1830. The mixed reality experience involving the Veloz is currently in production at UFF, while ECDS is using the model to produce a 3D animated video for the SlaveVoyages website to help audiences better understand the history and geography of the South Atlantic slave trade.
Previous 3D videos produced by ECDS for SlaveVoyages can be found here:
https://www.slavevoyages.org/blog/3d-videos-of-slaving-vessels/162/
ECDS staff Allen Tullos and Steve Bransford conducted an audio interview with historian Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery about her film Lumbeeland, her first venture into narrative screenwriting. The interview was condensed and crafted into a Southern Spaces article.
In September 2025, ECDS documented the Revising the Sacred Harp Symposium, a daylong event featuring talks and panel discussions about all aspects of the once-in-a-generation revision of The Sacred Harp, the most prominent shape note songbook at the center of a singing culture dating to the mid-nineteenth century. The symposium attracted an audience of more than 350, part of a three-day weekend that also drew more than 1,000 singers to the largest Sacred Harp singing in living memory. ECDS’s edited video recordings of the symposium’s sessions will anchor an interactive digital exhibition created in collaboration with the Sacred Harp Museum on the new songbook and its making, with publication expected in 2026.
In 2025, ECDS produced a Matterport tour of the CDC Museum’s exhibition “Art in the Time of Covid-19.” With the museum effectively shuttered in early 2025, the tour now serves as a rare record of the exhibition shortly before it was dismantled. Capturing the Matterport scan itself was fairly straightforward — the supplementary media is what took significant time to produce. ECDS conducted audio interviews with the exhibition’s two curators, who shared wonderful details about the art and the artists. That audio was paired with images of the artwork and embedded as videos within the tour.
In May, ECDS traveled with the NETEC team to produce a Matterport scan of the new Portable Biocontainment Unit (PBCU). This is a unique installation — it allows health care providers to bring biocontainment care directly to the patient rather than transporting infectious patients to a fixed hospital facility. The scan has been used as a training resource over the past year.
