Stephen Robertson’s granular data-driven analysis of events produced an interpretation of the racial disorder in Harlem in 1935 as a complex mix of attacks on white individuals and property and police violence.
The book was not necessarily the best form for such an interpretation as it requires arguments that are selective rather than inclusive in both their evidence and argument.
Instead, building on digital historians’ experiments in the 1990s, Robertson used the digital publishing platform Scalar to create a multi-layered, hyperlinked narrative that connects different scales of analysis: individual events, aggregated patterns, and a chronological narrative. You can find it online here.
Enacting a humanities approach to data, each event has a page that describes the interpretive choices made in determining its features and names and identifies the individuals involved.
Events are aggregated and incorporated into the narrative using tags which link to pages that offer a site for analysis and interpretation not just connection and collection.
Clicking on tags moves a reader across the dense web of connections that they create, drawing out threads of argument and intertwining them reveal the complex character of the racial violence in 1935.
Robertson, Director of the MA Program in History at George Mason Univeristy, will present his work at the Massachusetts Historical Society’s L. Dennis Shapiro and Susan R. Shapiro Digital History Seminar. Seminars bring together a diverse group of scholars and interested members of the public to workshop a pre-circulated paper.
The event will take place virtually on Thursday, March 21, 2024 from 5 until 6:15 pm, EST. There will also be comment by Jessica Marie Johnson of Johns Hopkins University Register here to attend online.
Purchasing the $25 seminar subscription gives you advance access to the seminar papers of all seven seminar series for the current academic year. Subscribe at www.masshist.org/research/seminars. Subscribers for the current year may login to view currently available essays.
Illustration: Harlem Riot headline, New York Daily News, March 20, 1935.
