Hello fellow DGH’ers! This week’s blog assignment was to explore one of the online projects provided and focus specifically on the maps that are at the center of the websites. I checked out most of the projects, but decided to analyze the Digital Harlem Dataset because I found it to be the most intriguing. The research project is a collection of data about the Harlem neighborhood around the 1920’s. All of the data provided was found in newspapers and legal records, and includes, but isn’t limited to, information on Churches in the area, sports and activities that were going on, and arrests that happened.
Just as Turnbull argues, this map too is subjective. What was included in the map very much depended on the people that were making it. Four researchers were involved in the creation of this site, and their initial goals for the project were what shaped the final product. They had to study the data and identify any themes present in the data, then decide which of those themes they thought were relevant to their argument. When deciding which information to include, they inevitably had to leave information out and therefore, are obscuring details that could potentially tell a different story. It is important we acknowledge the subjectivity of the project and the bias of the researchers. Not that it is a bad thing, because decisions had to be made about the data regarding what was important to include and whatnot. Without the researcher’s manipulation of the data we would merely have a dataset to look at with no direction to follow.
With that being said, the direction the map does point us towards is a greater understanding of the culture of the people that lived in the Harlem neighborhood during the 1920’s. The researchers wanted to zero in on the lives of the “ordinary African American New Yorkers”, which is unlike many projects about Harlem, which often focus on the black middle class or artists. Through the maps on the site users are able to easily distinguish the facets of life that were noteworthy of this group of people at the time. The different “filters” you could put on the map that showed the different features allow the user to see where and when certain things were happening, for example, specific church services or pick-up basketball games. I think it’d be very interesting to use the map and specifically look at an area with the arrests made in that area, then compare that to the sports or activities that took place in that area. I’d be curious to see if there were any noticeable trends or association between the two factors, and if not those two, maybe a different factor.
Very cool analysis, Jacey! I agree with your critique of the map’s biases and meet your curiosity about the connection between sports and arrests.
Hi Jacey, I thought your whole blog post was very intriguing. I also wrote about this map, so it was nice reading about someone else’s perspective on the information represented through the Harlem map. I appreciate how you went in to detail describing the logic and ultimately the bias that goes in to creating digitized maps. It is important to understand that in order to give direction on which aspects of Harlem to focus in on, there ultimately has to be some information left off. Good job!