Harlem Crime, Soapbox Speeches, and Beauty Parlors

The 2011 website Digital Harlem: Everyday Life, 1915–1930 invites users to navigate the iconic cityscape from the perspective of the community's workers, businesses, social meeting places, and events. Drawing upon historic sources such as maps, African American newspapers, district attorney's files, and arrest records, the site's creators constructed an interactive mapping platform rich with the potential for comparative sociocultural analysis. Users may assemble a seemingly infinite number of combinations of temporal and spatially oriented fields that may suggest unusual patterns of proximity. For example, one may question traffic patterns along major avenues or compare the location of speakeasies with other civic locales such as churches or schools. A review of Digital Harlem 's data integrity, including consideration of the selection and curation of source information, exposes the historiographic limits of this innovative approach to historical representation. A lack of sufficient provenancial source information, unbalanced sample source selection, and inconsistent data entry contributes to the decontextualization of Digital Harlem 's data. As a result, Digital Harlem misses an opportunity to harness digital tools to interrogate the complex social dynamic among a predominantly white legal authority class and Harlem's non-white residents.

Aesthetics · Art · Beauty · Cityscape · Context (archaeology) · Media studies · Newspaper · Political science · Politics · Representation (politics) · Sociocultural evolution · Sociology · Visual arts · World Wide Web · Anthropology · Computer Science · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law