{"id":1841,"date":"2016-11-07T14:01:36","date_gmt":"2016-11-07T22:01:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/?p=1841"},"modified":"2016-11-07T14:01:36","modified_gmt":"2016-11-07T22:01:36","slug":"mapping","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/2016\/11\/07\/mapping\/","title":{"rendered":"Mapping"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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). <\/span><\/p>\n

In light of these observations, this map explicitly <\/span>obscures t<\/span><\/i>he history of \u201ceveryday life\u201d 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 \u201ceveryday life\u201d) in a criminal light. The news stories in particular almost exclusively focus on police raids and arrests for illegal activity. <\/span><\/p>\n

What it does <\/span>reveal<\/span><\/i> 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. \u00a0That 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\u2019s arrests and criminal charges misrepresents it as a whole. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “Mapping”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1841","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\/1841","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\/48"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1841\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miriamposner.com\/classes\/dh101f16\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}