ATLANTA — The artist and documentary filmmaker Ruth Dusseault calls the stuff that has found its way onto the walls of Manuel’s Tavern, a beloved Eisenhower-era dive bar here, an “organic archive” and a “60-year installation piece.”

Those may be the loftiest descriptions ever applied to an overwhelming accretion of dusty beer cans, moldering sports pennants, law enforcement uniform patches, snapshots of well-known politicians and anonymous tipplers, risqué oil paintings traded as payment for ancient tabs, and the unmarked vessel, mounted above a shelf of drying pint glasses, that contains the ashes of Manuel Maloof, the original owner of the bar, who was once a towering figure in local Democratic Party politics.

Ms. Dusseault, a lecturer in the communications department at Georgia State University, is convinced that these items tell a rich and complex story of Atlanta. In an ambitious and slightly weird act of scholarship, she and a group of local academics have begun digitally documenting all of the curios and ephemera for an online research project they have titled “Unpacking Manuel’s Tavern.”