The Digital Harlem map is a geographical visualization compiled from legal records, archived, and published sources with the purpose of capturing how everyday life was like for those living in Harlem from 1915-1930. Aside from the geographical locations on the map itself, the map is subjective. The map focuses on tracing the lives of ordinary African New Yorkers, and strays away from just documenting black artists and the black middle class. The map decides to use sources that were pulled solely from legal records and black newspapers. The map is divided into its own categories; on the left, the user can filter out categories such as events, places, and specific people. The right bar specifically allows the user to filter through churches, sports, arrests, events that occurred during January 1925, and nightlife. From this map we can tell that there are a large cluster of churches, speakeasies, and nightclubs during this period indicating their popular role in Harlem culture. As a whole, these categories do not necessarily reflect the entire human and emotional experience faced by those living in Harlem. The map only documents the lives of six people, five men and one woman. Perhaps the female perspective has not been documented enough; perhaps these six do not accurately represent the entire population. We can question why the archivist only chose these six people out of all the records they had. We can also question why even more categories such as music, events that occurred at other dates and years, education, and community government were not represented.<\/p>\n
We can delve even further to this by examining one of the six people, Perry Brown. The map does reveal a lot about him. The left sidebar gives a short biography detailing his struggle of going through job after job and struggling to face eviction through various economic downturns, and recognizes him for his roles in community service. By clicking the red icon on the map you are able to see where he worked at and certain identification tags such as what his employee number was. By mapping his locations, we are able to see where he traveled to and settled down to given a time period (he worked incredibly far from where he lived and was a party member of). If this biography and location are served as a memoir to him and his struggle was the original purpose of the map, I believe the map can be better by including actual pictures (him, his family, the buildings where he lived and worked at). For whatever purpose the archivist has (even if they focus more on documenting circumstances than remembering the people during the time, which this map seems to do), providing actual media files such as photos or recordings would always add a more humanistic and visual experience for the audience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Digital Harlem map is a geographical visualization compiled from legal records, archived, and published sources with the purpose of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":175,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2653","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\/2653","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\/175"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2653\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}