Digital Harlem is a project conducted by the University of Sydney in Australia, which seeks to reveal the daily realities of black New Yorkers from the periods of 1915 to 1930.
This mapping represents a picture of black American life whose perspective dominantly reflects the legal records of the court, local law enforcement, and newspaper stories of the time. This clearly bred a bias which reasonably could afflict all documents in the period between 1915 and 1930, which were prone to racial discrimination. While the general coverage of individual stories does not necessarily mean outright discrimination, the breadth of the types of stories available mostly cover crime and violence amidst the black community, which is a limited view that ignores the vibrancy and cultural legacy present in this citizen body pre-1950. This notion is underscored in Turnbull’s essay which mentions the subjective perspective present in archival processes, which explains that bias is an inevitable part of the collection of historical material (the choices made of what to record color the nature of the history we remember).
In light of these observations, this map explicitly obscures the history of “everyday life” for black Americans in New York circa 1915-1930 through a lens which mainly focuses on illegal gambling, number and location of arrests, church locations, and the highlighting of an individual sexual crime investigation. While the map does acknowledge that Harlem churches were a center of cultural richness and expression, these observations are dwarfed by the disproportional amount of news stories and court records which misrepresents the black community (and their “everyday life”) in a criminal light. The news stories in particular almost exclusively focus on police raids and arrests for illegal activity.
What it does reveal is the interest of the NYPD in cracking down on illegal gambling circa 1915-1930, and the prominence of churches in unifying the local black community. That in mind, if I were to rework this map, I would not necessarily change the visualization of the mapping (which works well in my opinion), but would instead diversify the types of data I am working with. Given that the title of the map specifically seeks to represent everyday life, I find that finding newspaper articles which highlight the accomplishments and cultural institutions of the black community to provide a much more comprehensive and accurate depiction of their daily reality and contributions to the city of Harlem. The act of only recording the community’s arrests and criminal charges misrepresents it as a whole.
I really enjoyed the way you highlighted the blatant racial discrimination that is pervasive in this particular data visualization. Additionally, I hadn’t thought about the fact that even the newspapers that the creators were pulling the “data” from during that time could have been subject to a great deal of bias and discrimination. Knowing how culturally rich Harlem was, especially in the music scene at the time, it’s sad to see that the main focus is on crimes.
Excellently written, great observations, and insightful suggestions on how project could be improved. I’d like to hear more on what data you might add. Personally, I can’t help thinking about the writings, art, and music of the harlem renaissance. Or maybe pulling data out of biographies of those who lived in Harlem during that timeframe?
Very well written and astute assessment. Still, I think that a newspaper is less focused on the everyday, and more focused on the extraordinary or negative aspects, rather than the middle of the road, daily events.