For this week’s blog post, I looked at Digital Harlem, a map that purports to give a vision of everyday life in Harlem between 1915 and 1930. To do this, it uses legal records, newspapers, and other sources to place different events on a map of Harlem. Some of the mapped events are innocuous ones, such as basketball games, church services, dances, parties, and the like, but crime holds a prime position in the user interface- Alongside fields such as “Type of Event”, “Birthplace of Participant(s)”, “Race”, “Gender”, or “Street / Intersection Name”, there is a drop-down field specifically for “Charge / Conviction”.
This is a vision of Harlem with crime at its center, which is extremely problematic for a map that claims to be a portrayal of “everyday life”. While there are ways in which this is a defensible position, there are a few problems. Law enforcement has historically been (and continues to be) brutal towards people of color- which can not be ignored in a historically Black neighborhood. It’s easy to take legal records as an objective measure of the number of crimes committed, or the extent to which a neighborhood might be deemed “dangerous”, and harder to historicize them in the context of the type of biases held by law enforcement during this period. In the “sources” section, it does attempt to clarify that most of the DA’s closed case files deal with ordinary indivduals who were “usually acting out of desperation or poverty”, but it’s not nearly so visible as the map itself, and many visitors will not read this. Moreover, it also becomes extremely fraught to put “Charge / Conviction” as a single drop-down box. The baseline for a charge is much lower than that for a conviction, and this makes each incident ambiguous along those lines, which can heighten the image of Harlem as a violent, or crime-ridden neighborhood, which reflects stereotypes of what a Black community is.
I’m not sure how to reclaim this; the strength of data visualization is that it communicates immediately, on a visual, pre-linguistic level. However, it’s at the level of language that it becomes (somewhat) easier to add nuance, since we can articulate specific moments or ideas and make them available for criticism and deconstruction. If we have to reduce an individual’s entire story to a single record of a robbery, there’s simply no space to explore any of the ambiguities or external factors besides those sanctioned by the state. This is why theory is important; rather than replacing the map, or reworking the map, it can be useful to rethink the map that is already there.