Digital Harlem

I chose to examine the DH project entitled “Digital Harlem”, which chronicles life in Harlem, New York between 1915 and 1930, through the lens of six individuals. The project was put together by four historians at the University of Sydney, and it primarily uses legal records and black newspapers as sources.

At the bottom of the description page, the authors of the website acknowledge the limitations of their data, in a similar way to the writings of Turnbull which highlight the subjectivity and perspectival nature of maps. In the ‘About’ section of the site, they Include the following disclaimer: “[the contents of this website] do not offer any interpretation of that material other than the narratives associated with maps related to the lives of selected individuals and to particular topics in our research”. The referenced individuals include six people— four men and two women who were living in Harlem at the time. It is important to include such a disclaimer, and to be educated about the limitations of maps, because people have a tendency to give individual educators and pieces of work too much weight in shaping their understandings of the the world around them. It is important to recognize that everybody who is sharing a piece like this has limitations on their knowledge, and at the very least had to make certain decisions about what to leave out of the project in order to paint a meaningful picture with the information.

In this case, the sources, which were primarily legal records and black newspapers, paint a picture of Harlem in which violations of the law were a primary focus. By looking through the lists of events, it is evident that a large portion of them are violent crimes, without many positive events to balance them out. This implicitly assumes that the most important or significant things occurring in Harlem during this time were crime-related. If the historians had simply used different sources, such as business listings, the entire project would leave a very different impression of what Harlem was like during this time. While business listings would result in a project which was no less subjective or perspectival than legal records, they would leave the viewer with a very different idea of what Harlem was like at the time. Ultimately, it was important for the authors to include the disclaimer and be transparent about their sources so that the viewer can take the project with a grain of salt.