I chose the Digital Harlem map because it not only was it visualised in a very clean and user-friendly manner, but there is also a wealth of information available for examining and seeing where certain buildings or activities were located. It maps the locations of churches, nightlife (nightclubs, buffet flat, speakeasies), sports (baseball, cricket, tennis, basketball), numbers arrests (arrests for gambling), and a collection of documented events that occurred in January 1925. Although these datapoints ranged from 1915 to 1930, you can click on each value and more information about that building or event or activity will pop up, which I thought was very useful for getting more details about how similar clustered data points can be.<\/p>\n
One can also choose specific people and see what areas they lived in and what places they traveled to during the course of their life, such as how Annie Dillard was first a student and then later a houseworker and chambermaid farther and farther from the centre of Harlem. This information, along with the other historical events and buildings, were drawn from newspapers, archives, and published databases. Since the map represents different time periods of Harlem by different coloured lines, it assumes that the overlapped parts are still the same between decades, which is not necessarily true since a vibrant area like Harlem is constantly changing and in flux. The map is mostly objective since it isn\u2019t entirely based on one or two people\u2019s point of view, and they don\u2019t seem to be trying to convince the user of specific agendas, but since it\u2019s drawing information from published sources, we don\u2019t know if those newspapers in 1915-1930 could also have been subjective, or politically left or right.<\/p>\n
Options for an alternative map include allowing the user to overlay buildings with events, so that it\u2019s no longer segregated by each data type. That way, we can see whether things such as criminal activities are elevated in areas with more bars\/night clubs, compared to churches. It would also be useful to see the racial demographics in different ares of Harlem, and the population as well, so that we can look at the data in terms of percentages instead of only sheer numbers. If the entire map only went by numbers and statistics without taking into account the context of racial tensions and economic biases, then it may be misleading because there can be a location with a very small population and so a decent number of arrests may be considered worrisome for that area instead of a more dense neighbourhood with more activity.<\/p>\n
The map reveals many things about life in Harlem – however, since not every historical event will be reported in newspapers there could also be events that are obscured if they were never officially written down or publicised. Adding more personal accounts will also help the map be more humanistic instead of purely data-driven – this way we can obtain a more well-rounded understanding of the social, economic, and culture aspects of Harlem during that time period.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I chose the Digital Harlem map because it not only was it visualised in a very clean and user-friendly manner,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":117,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2796","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\/2796","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\/117"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2796\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f17\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}