The Digital Harlem project presents viewers with social, political, and historic information related to Harlem NY between the years 1915-1930.\u00a0The map on the site is linked to a search toggle, allowing users to probe for particular events, people, and places that have a connection to the map.\u00a0The Digital Harlem project uses a variety of sources — including District Attorney files, Probation Dept. files, newspapers, as well as a few other publications from the time.<\/p>\n
After perusing the site for a bit, I found myself a little confounded by the aims of Digital Harlem. The ‘about’ page states that the creators were invested in developing a project that focused on the banal, or quotidian aspects of early 20th c. Harlem. The developers of\u00a0the Digital Harlem project believe that discourse surrounding Harlem NY is often arranged in a way that centers the Harlem Renaissance– Black artists and thinkers post-WW1 and pre the Great Depression. This assumption alone is predicated on the Harlem Renaissance as\u00a0“common knowledge”. With that said, the creators gear their interest towards the Black citizens who lived outside of Black arts movements (and outside solid middle class status).<\/p>\n
The project begins by fetching most of its content from legal documents and judicial reports. I go back and fourth with this methodology — part of me is suspicious, why\u00a0utilize criminal records as your primary source when cultivating an image of “everyday Black life” ? But on the other hand — it’s naive for me to think that everyday Black life in the early 20th c. wasn’t already thoroughly criminalized by the state!! It’s a disturbing thought to reconcile–\u00a0it’s probably\u00a0possible to explore avenues of Black sexuality, Black vernacular, or Black hobbies via historic records\u00a0that perceive such processes as illicit.<\/p>\n
The map mixes a number of happenings, such as criminal charges with community festivities. For example, the project allows users to delve into cases of sodomy, while in a separate search a YMCA bowling contest. It’s a big endeavor to try and comprehend how these two events both\u00a0inform an understanding of the ‘Black everyday’. While the rhetoric of the project is initially alarming (i.e., “charge”, “conviction”, and overwhelmingly negative occurrences), the nuance and complexity of the project is illuminated after a few minutes browsing the various search options.\u00a0If I were to re-envision an alternative GIS project, I would focus not on alternative sources, but alternative ways of organizing search options and the format of information.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Digital Harlem project presents viewers with social, political, and historic information related to Harlem NY between the years 1915-1930.\u00a0The map on the site is linked to a search toggle, … Continue reading “Blog Post #7: Digital Harlem”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1790"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1790\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}