For this week’s blog post, I looked at Digital Harlem. This project which maps out aspects of everyday life for “ordinary African New Yorkers” from 1915 to 1930, drawing data from legal records and black newspapers.
It offers maps displaying different categories of mapped data, such as arrests, nightlife, and churches; below the map, a timeline displays the mapped events in chronological order. While the map offers a look at a broad range of activities and events in Harlem, it is not a comprehensive record of life for Black Americans in the city. It assumes that legal activities and events covered by newspapers can offer a view of daily life in Harlem–however, daily life often includes activities that are mundane and carried out without being recorded. The information the map includes comes from institutional sources–legal documents and print publications.
Activities that aren’t documented in these sources are left out of the narrative; in particular, domestic narratives that reflect the activities of women and children are obscured. While the map is supposed to be about ordinary people, it does not draw from any firsthand accounts of ordinary people.
My suggestion would be to include information that comes directly from the “ordinary African New Yorkers”, outside of institutional authority. This might be in the form of letters, journals, and other ephemera. Another aspect of life during this time period that isn’t included is art and culture; were there any significant spaces of artistic development in Harlem?
The “number of arrests” view might suggest that the number arrests made is correlated to the amount of crime or relative safety of a community. An area with many arrests might not actually be less safe, but rather, be an area that is more densely populated or patrolled more–a reflection of socioeconomic conditions, not the occurrence of crime.
While the map contains a great deal of information about 1915-1930’s Harlem, it does very little to show the user what Harlem was like for those who lived there, at a sensory level–the sights, sounds, and even smell of a day in Harlem.
I’d like to learn more about visualizing geospatial information outside of the conventional Cartesian plane map, and timelines that don’t read as left-to right linear progressions; these conventions are so engrained in my understanding of the world that it’s hard for me to fathom alternative systems.