Is Digital Harlem about crime not everyday life?

• No. Although many of the events in the database are crimes, there are almost as many records related to places as to events, and those locations are where residents of Harlem spent their time. Places reveal the shape of everyday life at least as clearly as events. While many of the places in Digital Harlem were made visible through the window that legal records open on the neighborhood, only two of the more than 150 location types are defined by criminal activity: brothels and call flats.
• Even if we look at events in isolation,relying on the fact that two-thirds of the records are crimes to argue that crime is the site’s focus oversimplifies the nature of the sources in Digital Harlem. The largest single category of events is numbers arrests, for the crime of either placing or collecting bets on what would be the day’s number. Notwithstanding the marginal scholarly attention it has received, this form of illegal gambling was a central part of the cultural and economic life of the neighborhood, a black owned and black-run business that turned over millions of dollars a year. The third-largest category of event is social club meetings. If you take out numbers gambling and prostitution, the second largest category of event, criminal and non-criminal events in Digital Harlem are roughly equal in quantity. Looking beyond a simple count, then, criminal events in Digital Harlem are interwoven with everyday life.

Why can you map only a small number of people?

• We had planned to enter information on all the individuals who we could associate with an address that we found in our sources, on the assumption that people would appear in more than one source. After taking several months to enter only a few hundred records and not finding such connections, we decided to prioritize entering information about places and events. (Individuals who have been entered appear in records of events). As all the information has to be manually entered in the database, not entering information about people allowed us to enter more of the information about the events and places that had generated the most research questions.
• The only set of sources we used that offered more than a single location for an individual were the Probation Department case files and the records of women paroled from Bedford Hills Prison (see Sources). Using these records, it is possible to map the residences, workplaces, and leisure of individuals over a period of years. We have several hundred of these files and hope to enter more of these individuals into the database in the future.

Why does Digital Harlem not include copies of its sources?

• Our intention in building Digital Harlem was to visualize our sources rather than build an online archive. One reason we took that approach is that the sources we use are covered by copyright and licensing restrictions, and cannot be included in a freely accessible database like Digital Harlem. As an alternative, we have included brief notes and quotations from the records, as well as full citations that allow you to consult to original records yourself

Why does Digital Harlem only include a sample of sources - records from 1920, 1925, and 1930?

• Because gathering a range of sources from different collections is a very time consuming and labor intensive process - especially when you have to travel from Australia to New York City to do so as we did. To find relevant legal records, we had to go through tens of thousands of files. To identify information in Harlem's black newspapers we had to closely read, and reread, each issue on microfilm (we did our research prior to the digitization of those papers). We were only able to gather the quantity of material we did because four scholars collaborated on this research over a period of several years.
• In addition, the information we found had to be manually entered into the database, as did the locations of addresses in Harlem. Even with the help for several years of a team of research assistants, it was not possible to enter all of the sources we gathered.
• We prioritized entering material from 1920, 1925, and 1930 to provide a sample that spanned the decade of the 1920s. In the case of the two newspapers, we entered data from every third month in each of our sample years to span a year, and encompass different seasons.