Blog Post #6: Digital Harlem

I chose to focus on Digital Harlem, a digital humanities project focusing on everyday life in Harlem, New York from the years 1915-1930. The 4 people who created this digital archive were from Australia and chose to display Harlem in a different light. Rather than portraying life from black artists and the black middle class, as usually done when thinking of Harlem, they chose to chow regular New York City life. Their sources were mainly legal records, such as the district attorney’s closed case files, the probation department case files, newspapers, the committee of fourteen papers, and the writer’s program collection.

Their interface and research is mainly observed through their usage of maps. As we learned in class, maps are often subjective and can be created in a way to strengthen the point of view of the author, can be misleading, or easily misinterpreted. This is not all maps, however, as most are thought of to be historically authentic and not open to interpretation. Below is a map showing arrests from 1915-1925 without a specific tag. 

Although, I do not believe that these maps and the ability to thoroughly search through crimes is inaccurate, I believe that the authors might have been trying to show Harlem as a crime ridden neighborhood throughout those times. This is because even though there is a chance to look for searches including “weddings” and “parties”, almost 90% of the tags have to do with crimes, arrests, or illegal things of some sort. Just like David Turnball mentions that it is impossible for a map to absolutely show everything, it seems as if this map is specifically trying to show one thing: crimes. It might even reflect the point of view of law enforcement at the time, since being law enforcers meant that most of their word revolved around solving crimes, which led to crime being their lives.

I would propose to keep these same maps, instead of creating a whole new one, but change the title of the project itself. This is not a representation of everyday life, since I am almost certain that most people in Harlem at that time did not just rob, steal, deal drugs, etc. I understand that the authors do not want to focus on only black life, but I believe that they could focus on only crime (although it already seems they did) and could just retitle the project to: Crime in Harlem 1915-1930. If I could propose changes to this map, it would simply be removing the other tags, such as “weddings” and “parties” and tabs like “churches”. I would also find it interesting to have the mug shot of the person who committed the crime; that would be interesting to see there.