During the past year, the OpenWorld Atlanta project continued to grow and expand its international reach and collaborations. Key activities in 2025 included developing scalable GeoAI workflows to accelerate the digitization of historical infrastructure data, expanding collaborative research across institutions, and integrating emerging technologies into humanities-centered inquiry. OpenWorld Atlanta also strengthened its international teaching impact through partnerships with German geography educators, who collaborated onsite in Atlanta to adapt the platform into open educational resources for secondary and university classrooms. This work emphasized urban change, segregation, and spatial justice, and positioned Atlanta as a digitally accessible case study within global curricula. Together, these initiatives reinforced OpenWorld Atlanta as a nexus for interdisciplinary research, pedagogy, and international collaboration.
We are excited to begin a new phase of OpenWorld Atlanta in 2026 and increase our collaboration with local communities. Our team has submitted multiple major grant applications in the past months to organize workshops with neighborhood organizations and other partners around Atlanta.
In Spring 2025, ECDS digital publishing specialist Dr. Bailey Betik worked with Dr. Tracy Scott (Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Sociology) to design and develop an online oral history archive website. The resulting Moonshot Families website is an educational endeavor to preserve and make available primary sources about the astronaut families of the Moonshot Era and expands on a research project that brings together Scott’s own history as an early era “astronaut kid” with her professional expertise as a sociologist and educator. Scott’s site features oral histories from families of astronauts of that era alongside interactive transcripts.
Helmed by lead programmer at ECDS, Jay Varner, and ECDS Specialist Dr. Joanna Mundy, OpenTour Builder is an open-source software platform for building geospatial walking and driving tours that are optimized for mobile devices. With this tool, tour builders can easily create interactive, attractive tours that guide users from stop to stop using their smartphone’s GPS and OpenTour Builder’s native Google Maps instructions. In 2025 ECDS continued to develop and support the OpenTour Builder Tour open-source software platform. Through a partnership with ECDS, Georgia Humanities gave out a new grant to the DeKalb History Center for the creation of an OpenTour Tour.
New sites approved and released in 2025 include the following:
We also approved multiple sites that are still in progress of being developed including tours about The Opium Wars in South China, Stone Mountain, Towns County Georgia, and class sites for Westminster and University of Florida.
Additionally, many new tours were launched on existing sites, such as the following:
In Winter 2025, Dr. Bailey Betik worked with Dr. Dwight Andrews (Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Music) to develop a site for the Theorizing African American Music conference. Hosted at Emory in the summer of 2025, this groundbreaking conference brought together more than fifty scholars from across the country for sessions analyzing a range of African diasporic music practices, research that is revolutionizing the field of music theory. Betik worked with Andrews and his co-collaborators Philip Ewell (Hunter College of the City University of New York) and Christopher Jenkins (Oberlin Conservatory of Music).
In the spring 2025, ECDS team members were approached by Dr. Clifton Crais to help him develop a digital monograph companion site for his book The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World. Because The Killing Age is a long work of global history meant for the general reader, Dr. Crais decided to create a website to accompany the book. “The idea was three-fold,” Crais notes, “to reduce the length by moving the bibliography online; to make available databases and other data; and, most importantly, to invite readers into a broader conversation about history and our planetary crises that is not possible in a purely written form.”
Dr. Crais collaborated with Dr. Bailey Betik to design thekillingage.com, which went live alongside the book’s release. Some of the material in the book is also on the webpage, but now interactively. Readers can also discover new materials, as well as links to various databases and scientific studies. Featured in these materials are data visualizations by graduate student Bradley Erickson and maps created by GIS librarian Megan Slemons.
In fall 2025, Dr. Joyce Flueckiger (Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Religion) approached ECDS to develop a companion site of photo galleries for her six books, including her most recent publication, On Mullingar Hill: Memory, Movement, and Belonging in a Himalayan Hill Station (Primus Books, 2025). On Mullinger Hill tells the oral histories and personal narratives of twenty-three shopkeepers/residents in Landour Bazaar, Mussoorie, whose families have helped to create the culture and heritage of the Himalayan hill station. The book expands who “counts,” beyond colonial actors, in the histories of India’s hill stations.
Dr. Bailey Betik and ECDS graduate student Diana Duarte Salinas worked with Dr. Flueckiger to design and develop a website to showcase her research photos.
As an extension of an existing project, ECDS helped launch a digital archive of the t-shirts of activist, coal miner, and educator Kipp Dawson. ECDS specialist Sara Palmer worked with scholars Jessie Ramey of Chatham University and Catherine Evans, a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University, to build an archive titled “Wearing the Movement.” The collection of over 150 t-shirts, scanned by the University of Pittsburgh Library System, was curated by Ramey and Evans, who provided metadata for each shirt. This includes information on the political or cultural cause the shirt represents, associated social movements, decade, location of origin, color, size, and additional context. Palmer then constructed a website to house the archive, ingesting the content and applying a design that complements the primary project website. The site allows users to browse the shirts, filter searches by metadata, and explore origin locations on an interactive map. It launched alongside a physical exhibition of the t-shirts at Chatham University, running from October to December 2025.
After six years of development, in 2025, the Sounding Spirit Collaborative launched the beta version of the Sounding Spirit Digital Library, a collection of digitized sacred music books from seven institutions. The library launched in the spring with approximately 100 books and expanded to over 1,000 volumes by year’s end. The collaborative also hosted the two-day Sounding Spirit Singing School, a convening that drew 200 singers and scholars of sacred vernacular music to Emory for scholarly talks, workshops, and singing sessions. Sounding Spirit also curated “Singing the Sacred,” a major physical exhibition in the Pitts Theology Library Gallery with a companion catalog presenting books featured in the digital library.
Led by Dr. Bethany Caruso and Dr. Sheela Sinharoy in the Rollins School of Public Health, the Evidence and Data on Gender and the Environment (EDGE) Research Group is a team of researchers focused on exploring relationships between the environment, gender, and health, with a special focus on water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH). EDGE partnered with Dr. Bailey Betik to design and create a website to house their public health measures, reports, and summaries, especially helpful in preserving work done on grants with precarious funding futures.
This year, Dr. Bailey Betik and Dr. Alex Cors partnered with Georgia State University faculty and Atlanta Studies network members Dr. Brennan Collins and Dr. Marni Davis to revive and redesign Teaching Atlanta. The site is a collaborative digital resource for college and high school instructors seeking to incorporate Atlanta and the Metro Atlanta region into their curricula as subject matter or case study.
Following a significant setback in which the original site was compromised and its content lost, the team restored the platform to full functionality while giving it a fresh, modern design. Teaching Atlanta serves as a hub for educators across disciplines and institutions, connecting them not only to the rich history and culture of Atlanta, but to one another. The site is part of the broader Atlanta Studies network and reflects a shared commitment to grounding student learning in the communities they call home.
Throughout 2025, GIS Librarian Megan Slemons worked with Dr. Yanna Yannakakis (History) on Power of Attorney in Oaxaca, Mexico: Native People, Legal Culture, and Social Networks. While this project began in 2015, this year’s work focused on creating maps and data visualizations for a second study region, Teposcolula, to mirror the visuals made several years ago for the Villa Alta region. This work was done with the goal of publishing new content on the site in early 2026. This year we created visuals for Teposcolula, following the same themes as the Villa Alta page but using newer tools and updated skills and ideas for data visualization. There was – as with the first part – a good deal of research into pinpointing these 18th century towns and villages on the map, when names have changed and many even went by multiple names at the time of study.
We also re-made (and improved) several of the maps for the Villa Alta page due to discontinuation of older tools and platforms.
Finally, we created some introductory maps about the state of Oaxaca, highlighting the two study districts and giving an overview of geographic and linguistic regions as well as major roads and cities.
The National Emerging Special Pathogens Training and Education Center’s mission is to set the gold standard for special pathogen preparedness and response across health systems in the U.S. with the goals of driving best practices, closing knowledge gaps, and developing innovative resources.
The NETEC vision is a sustainable infrastructure and culture of readiness for managing suspected and confirmed special pathogen incidents across the United States public health and health care delivery systems.
Joanna Mundy with ECDS supports the NETEC website (https://netec.org) and the NETEC Resource Library (https://repository.netecweb.org/) a platform through which NETEC shares education and training resources for infectious disease preparedness.
In 2025, the NETEC Resource Library shared 29 new assets, including 25 downloadable tools, for training and education, while maintaining a collection of over 840 assets. The Resource Library saw 13,644 downloads, underscoring its role as a trusted hub for HCID guidance, checklists, illustrations, and training aids.
You can find out more about NETEC’s progress in 2025 with their 2025 Wrapped post.
In fall 2025, Dr. Bailey Betik led the ECDS website redesign working group. Last redesigned in 2021, the ECDS website redesign process focused on migrating the site’s content from Cascade to WordPress for more flexibility and reorganizing content for enhanced user experience. The new site enables quicker access to our workshop signups, displays a hero banner of our most recent project blog post, and features a new contact form for easier connection to ECDS.
