Hey everybody!<\/p>\n
For this week\u2019s blog post I chose to analyze the \u201cDigital Harlem: Everyday life 1915-1930\u201d map created by four historians at the University of Sydney. The information used in the map was gathered by \u201cexploring a sample of legal records and black newspapers.\u201d It focuses on tracking the lives of regular African New Yorkers during the time. Specifically, the website itself states, \u201cIt\u00a0seeks to capture the range of activities, places, and relationships that made up everyday life, bringing into focus the multiple rhythms that shaped life in Harlem, the repetitive as well as the linear, the daily, weekly and seasonal variations as well as features that characterized the period as a whole.\u201d <\/p>\n
Firstly, there is the option contained in the map to track each person\u2019s movements. This feature is created in such a way that, at first glance, the viewer feels as though they\u2019re looking at information that came from a present day tracker. It seems almost as though we, as the viewers of the map, are seeing each person\u2019s movements from the moment that they wake up to the moment that they go to sleep. However, after remembering no such technology existed (or in this regard, was used for the project) I immediately understood what Turnball was saying about maps being subjective. Clearly, the four historians behind the creation of this map were not able to track each and every movement of the people\u2019s lives they reported on in the map. Therefore, all of the \u201csilenced\u201d pieces of their lives, or the pieces that the newspapers\/legal records leave out, are not included in the maps. This is incredibly important to remember as we are led to believe that we know all about the happenings of these people\u2019s lives while we may only know a very small percentage of what we did. Who knows where they went between the basketball courts, the churches, the illegal gambling tournaments, etc. Additionally, who knows what the historians found but chose not to include due to assumedly irrelevant or unimportant information. <\/p>\n
On the other hand, the map does provide a new, interesting perspective on information I never would\u2019ve analyzed in such a way. Though I\u2019m sure there was a great deal of information left out, I do like the things that the creators chose to include. It\u2019s interesting to be able to pinpoint where anything from a pick-up basketball game to a parachute jump took place. I\u2019d really like to see similar information gathered from a different city and compare the two datasets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hey everybody! For this week\u2019s blog post I chose to analyze the \u201cDigital Harlem: Everyday life 1915-1930\u201d map created by<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":186,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/186"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2561\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}