Digital Harlem Map

The Digital Harlem map is an incredible and interactive map that shows everyday life in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood from 1915 to 1930. On the right, the map has click throughs for churches, sports, numbers arrests, January 1935, and Nightlife. When you click these buttons, there is a description of what is represented and the map gets filled with activity that happened. It is very straightforward and easy to navigate which I really appreciate. In addition, you can search specific events that happened like automobile crashes, abortion, divorce raids, and even parachutes jumps. You can also look at people. What the authors did was make up an individual’s name, and followed his/her life: Residence, activities in Harlem, travel, etc.

If I hadn’t taken Digital Humanities 101, I would have been unaware of the map’s perspectival and subjective aspects. To make this map, they focused specifically “not on black artists and the black middle class, but on the lives of ordinary African New Yorkers.” By choosing this demographic, they are choosing the perspective of which to look at Harlem. In addition, the overall map is subjective because they are the ones who chose which incidents would be included in the map. I think subjectivity is specifically seen in the “Select a Person” area because there are only 6 people- which means only 6 lives of people who were chosen by the creators of this map.

I thought the categories they chose (Churches, sports, numbers arrests, January 1935, and Nightlife) are really important; however, I feel as though more categories were important to highlighting everyday life in Harlem. Possibly adding schools and restaurants would be interesting as an alternative map. In addition, we learned in lecture about the importance of visualization in maps- we could change colors of pins and even create squares instead of circles for pins. I think changing the color of the icons could be beneficial to this map because it often blends into the color of the background map making it hard to decipher where exactly the pins are when you start to zoom in. Lastly if I were doing an alternative map, I would actually want to see different perspectives other than “ordinary African New Yorkers.” Having different maps that show what the affluent looked like and possibly what black artists look like would be really awesome to compare and contrast to this already created map. All in all, a really cool and detailed map that we can all pull inspiration from as we create our own maps for this project.