Main Street, Carolina

Principal Investigator

Robert Allen, UNC department of American studies, history and communication studies
Natasha Smith, Carolina Digital Library and Archives

External Partners

Levine Museum of the New South, Charlotte
New Hanover County Public Library, Wilmington

Project Description

These projects grow out of a multi-year collaboration among Robert Allen, a scholar of American cultural and social history, and several units of UNC’s Wilson Library: the North Carolina Collection, Documenting the American South and Carolina Digital Library and Archives.

Allen and Natasha Smith, head of digital publishing for Wilson Library, led the team that devised, secured funding for, built, and tested “Going to the Show" (GTTS): an online digital library project that documents and illuminates the history of the experience of cinema in North Carolina between 1896 and 1930.

GTTS contains the first state-wide database of cinema venues ever compiled (1,300 sites in more than 200 communities) and the first state-wide inventory of African-American movie theaters ever compiled. Thousands of content items (photographs, postcards, newspaper ads and articles, original architectural drawings) are georeferenced and keyed to digitized historic city maps (Sanborn Fire Insurance maps) for 45 towns and cities in N.C.

GTTS also features:

• A detailed case study of early moviegoing in Wilmington, N.C.;
• A timeline of exhibition history in Wilmington between 1897 and 1960;
• Original architectural drawings (and accompanying historical notes) for 23 N.C. theaters built between 1922 and 1950;
• An annotated theater manager’s ledger from 1910;
• Reproduction of the performance of an “illustrated song” from 1910 using rare, original magic lantern slides;
• Some 60,000 words of historical commentary. 

Launched on July 1, 2009, GTTS was supported by a N.C. Echo Grant from the N.C. State Archives, as well as internal funding and in-kind support from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, the University Program in Cultural Studies, the American Studies Department and the School of Information and Library Science. Professor Allen’s work on the project during the 2008-09 academic year was supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Fellowship. GTTS was named a “We the People” project by NEH in 2008.

Main Street, Carolina grew out of the system devised for electronic stitching and georeferencing Sanborn maps for GTTS. It will be a flexible, user-friendly, Web-based platform that will allow local libraries, schools, historical societies, neighborhood and community organizations, heritage and tourism offices, and preservation groups in 45 communities across the state to build densely-layered historical maps of their downtowns.

Users can add a wide variety of “local” data—historical and contemporary photographs, postcards, newspapers ads and articles, architectural drawings, historical commentary, family papers, and excerpts from oral history interviews—all keyed to and layered on top of more than 1,000 Sanborn map pages—which will continue to be served by the UNC University Libraries. 

Two external partners will develop projects this spring to test Main Street, Carolina: the Levine Musem of the New South in Charlotte and the New Hanover County Public Library in Wilmington.

Additionally, Allen will offer an undergraduate course this spring (also called Main Street, Carolina) in which students will work on collaborative projects that can be displayed using Main Street, Carolina’s digital toolkit. A graduate seminar, planned for fall 2010, will bring together graduate students in city and regional planning, history, the School of Information and Library Science, geography, and American studies to work with local “clients” on Main Street, Carolina-based projects.

Allen received the first C. Felix Harvey Award to Advance Institutional Priorities to support Main Street, Carolina.  He and Natasha Smith have subsequently received an NEH Digital Humanities Start Up Grant to support the project, and Allen has received additional support from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research.