DIGITAL HARLEM– Everyday Life, 1915-1930. Created by White, Garton, White, & Robertson
University of Sidney
The Overview
“A way for students to develop a complex picture of the neighborhood by exploring a diverse set of historical sources revealing everyday life, and to situate places and events in Harlem’s material environment… {to create} a spatial exploration of the lived neighborhood”
Digital Harlem blog
Digital Harlem is a collaborative research project that provides a closer look at everyday life in Harlem from 1915 to 1930. This project was curated by four historians in the Department of History at the University of Sydney, Australia: Shane White, Stephen Garton, Graham White, and Stephen Robertson, with several contributors and assistants noted throughout the site.
This project systematically explores a large sampling of legal records and newspapers to track and map crimes, parties, and social events throughout Harlem in the early 1900s. In doing so, a site was created that focuses on the everyday life of the average citizen, rather than just those living in the extreme circumstances of poverty or the upper class.
It should be noted that this digital project makes a point not to offer any interpretation of that material other than the narratives associated with maps related to the lives of selected individuals and to particular topics in our research. The creators’ opinions and perceptions can be found in other publications and the featured project blog.
The Digital Harlem mapping project utilizes the Heurist knowledge management system developed by Ian Johnson and Artem Osmakov, also from the University of Sydney. This program is promoted as “a unique solution to the data management needs of Humanities researchers,” and the list of projects found on the Heurist Network site proves this claim; it has been used in historical mapping projects similar to Digital Harlem, such as Beyond 1914 / Book of Remembrance and November 1918. The decision to use this technology in the Harlem project strengthens the effect of the provided resources immensely.
The Purpose
“The space of Harlem was not only “signified;” it was also “lived.” It had material and social dimensions: streets and buildings, and residents, visitors, and workers.”
Digital Harlem Blog
The Digital Harlem team outlines the purpose of this collaborative project in clear terms on the project blog:
- to consider Harlem’s place in the New York of the early 1900’s, rather than as an individual neighborhood.
- to develop a clearer picture of the neighborhood by exploring and employing a diverse set of historical sources that recount the everyday movements of Harlem’s diverse population
- to create a better visual understanding of places and events in Harlem’s material environment and social atmosphere
- to lead students, teachers, and fellow researchers to consider Harlem as a powerful signifier of black America, particularly in the chosen time period
What went right?
- Thoroughness: It’s clear that the team behind this mapping project spent considerable time and effort hunting down reputable information and trying to create a simple framework with which a broad audience could interact and engage. Visuals, external links, kudos to designers and assistants… each of these components illustrates the work that went into creating Digital Harlem.
- Resources and Credibility: The DH team chose extremely reputable resources and carefully cited each one of them, which adds a major component of credibility to the project. A quick glance at each team member’s educational track record further adds to the overall effect of credible peer research.
- Simplicity: The modest design of the DH project is no coincidence- the purpose of the site is to educate and inform readers on resourced information, not to impress with excessive graphics and complex programs. Whether or not the choice of a simple color palette and a plain outline was truly intentional, the impact of the data is greatly emphasized.
- Accessibility: As stated above, Digital Harlem is a simple site; the main components of it’s only page are the map and the navigation buttons at the top. A short blurb discussing sources, the map, the timeline, and other factors in the Digital Harlem project appear when navigating the site, giving the appearance of easy accessibility. However…
What went wrong?
- Information location: …if the reader is interested in finding detailed lists of resources, information about authors and contributors, and many different explanations regarding the site’s content, they are forced to visit and navigate a separate blog. This is tricky- it would be nearly impossible to implement so much content into an originally basic site, however, switching back and forth between the project and the many blog posts in order to learn becomes a rather laborious task.
- Timeline navigation: There are two ways to view Harlem’s history on the project site: the interactive map and the written timeline. Each updates when the user provides a criteria for a search. The navigation of the map is a fairly usable click-and-drag method, but the timeline has to be both scrolled through and dragged. As the user scrolls, the dates and events are constantly adjusted and shifted around, which makes it quite complicated to track the connection between events, and once a certain event is scrolled past, the user is left dragging and scrolling every which way trying to return to the original event location.
- Browser overload: Attempting to navigate the project site proved to be a challenge on a multitude of browsers and devices. Some days the map wouldn’t load, some days it was the timeline. Oftentimes when attempting to load the site itself, the Heurist system loading page would load for several minutes with no results. This incompatibility may be a byproduct of the project’s age. Though it was redeveloped in 2015, the site still causes a bit of a headache when it comes to accessing it.
