Overall
Digital Harlem was an exciting trip to the past to navigate and see what the Harlem Renaissance (or Rebirth) was like from 1925 – 1930. The University of Sydney team of four did a great job of including open sources of information as to where they got their records, detailing the map, and using what was readily available at the time
The Good
This project, keep in mind it’s just over 10 years old, did great at it’s time using public data on the internet and in-person libraries to show the audience what life was like in Harlem. To put yourself in a 2009 mindset and navigate the website, you’d find that it’s so information loaded with tons of visuals and hyperlinks. It is a never ending spiral of news back then, sports scores, neighborhood drama, etc.
The Bad
Now back to the mindset of when this project was reviewed, the year of 2020. Looking back at this website, it’s an unpolished gem. Accessing the website can take some time because it’s based in Asia, and runs slow. Pictures were most likely meant to display on 1366×768 or 800×600 monitors at this creation. Today, the average display resolution for a monitor is 1920×1080. So pictures to the average reader on their computer can appear stretched, out of center, and shrank too much with filler space.
The map they use itself, the keystone of the project, has great information on the surface. However, zoom in and you might find some margin of error within lines, labels, etc. on exact streets on houses. Of course one would call this nitpicking, but for a project based in 2009, can you really blame them? They did the best they could for the technology readily available in that day.
