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Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935

Stephen Robertson, "Scale and Narrative: Conceiving a Longform Digital Argument for Data-driven Microhistory," in Zoomland: Exploring Scale in Digital History and Humanities, eds Florentina Armaselu and Andreas Fickers (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2024)

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A (Digital) Form for the Argument The form of this publication was developed to fit the argument by taking advantage of features of the digital medium to extent the form of a monograph. Fitting the argument to the print form of the historical monograph would have required reducing the detail and the relationships between its elements with the effect of simplifying the complexity of the disorder. The digital medium allowed for a multi-layered, hyperlinked narrative that connects different scales of analysis: individual events, aggregated patterns, and a chronological narrative. As a long-form study that makes a sustained argument based on in-depth research, this publication fits how historians characterize the form of a monograph. The label which best captures this combination of features is digital monograph.

Where a print book forces the use of only a selection of sources, the immersive and interactive digital medium offers the capacity to store and present quantities of information. That evidence can be directly connected to narrative rather than presented only as fragmentary quotations and citations that provide directions for locating information as it is in print books. In that way, a digital form fits the different research practices of digital historians that Edward Ayers highlighted in 2001:
“In conventional practice, historians obscure choices and compromises as we winnow evidence through finer and finer grids of note-taking, narrative, and analysis, as the abstracted patterns take on a fixity of their own. A digital archive, on the other hand, reminds us of the connections we are not making, of the complications of the past, every time we look at it."

It is not simply the scale of its content that makes a digital form of publication different. It is how, as Janet Murray pointed out, that material can be used “to tell stories from multiple vantage points and to offer intersecting stories that form a dense and wide-spreading web.” Murray’s description of that opportunity employs metaphors that invoke the spatial property of the digital medium, a web with threads of linked elements to be navigated and intersections that pose choices in contrast to the single linear path offered by a print book. For historians, those properties offer an opportunity to present an argument that, by linking multiple threads together “as layered or branching or interweaving narratives,” conveys the complexity of the past more directly than the form of a print book. Some readers of early experiments of what was initially called hypertext history, expecting the flow of argument associated with the book, found navigating that complex form difficult and struggled to find and follow the argument. However, for data-driven digital history, that disruption to reading is a feature not a bug. Links can call attention to the analytic and interpretive processes and decisions that create the data from which arguments derive. As Johanna Drucker has advocated; they contribute to “an interface that is meant to expose and support the activity of interpretation.”

The particular form of this publication draws on the vision that Robert Darnton offered in 1999 of an electronic book structured “in layers arranged like a pyramid." Where Darnton conceived layers as augmentations of a top narrative layer, providing thematic accounts, documentation, historiography, suggestions for classroom uses, and commentary, as an elaboration of a print book rather than the basis for a different form or argument, I have reimagined the layers in terms of scale. The top layer of Harlem in Disorder is a three-part chronological description narrative, sections 3-6 in the table of contents, that cover the events of the night of March 19, 1935, the prosecutions that spanned the following several months, and the investigation undertaken by the Mayor's Commission on Conditions in Harlem (MCCH) that culminated in a report submitted to New York City’s Mayor more than a year later. Linked to those pages are an additional layer of pages that examine categories of events, stages and outcomes in the legal process, and the forms, process, and reporting of the investigation and aggregate those groupings at different scales. Pages on the individual events of the disorder, of the legal process and the investigation are a further layer, section 7 in the table of contents. The sources, section 8 in the table of contents, are the final layer, each a page to which all the notes citing that source are linked.

A useful comparison with this project is Lincoln Mullen’s America’s Public Bible: A Commentary, another publication of Stanford Digital Projects that also reimagined Darnton’s layers. In an explanation of “How to use this website,” he describes how “the different elements of the site form an interpretative pyramid, something like the e-books that Robert Darnton envisioned." Scale serves as the basis of Mullen's layers, reflecting the form and process of his argument; namely, “identifying, visualizing, and studying quotations in American newspapers." At the base is a dataset of millions of biblical quotations that appeared in newspapers, a selection of which are aggregated into trend lines showing the appearance of a verse over time in another layer. Two narrative layers offer interpretations of that data: verse histories for a selection of the data, and essays on broader questions in the history of the Bible in the United States and the most popular verses and genres of verses. Mullen captures the different balance between data and narrative in the forms of our arguments when he labels America’s Public Bible an “interactive scholarly work," presumably evoking William Thomas’ definition. As “hybrids of archival materials and tool components,” “interactive scholarly works have a limited set of relatively homogeneous data, and they might include a textual component on the scale of a brief academic journal article." The emphasis on narrative and the diversity of sources of Harlem in Disorder, by contrast, fit Thomas’ definition of a digital narrative: a “highly configured, deeply structured” “work of scholarly interpretation or argument embedded within layers of evidence and citation”, with “explicit hypertext structures” that situate evidence and interpretation in ways that allow readers to unpack the scholarly work."

The multi-layered, hyperlinked form for the argument of Harlem in Disorder was constructed using Scalar, an open-source digital authoring and publishing platform developed by the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture at the University of Southern California. Scalar is based on reconceiving the database in humanities terms: a “speculative remapping of rigidly logical structures toward more conceptual ones, creating possibilities for many-to-many relations of diverse and varied kinds,” to use the words of Tara McPherson, part of the team that developed Scalar. For this publication, the key feature is Scalar's flexible structure, which “allows you to model conceptual structures in a variety of ways, exploring the full capacity for various sequences and groupings.” Equally important, Scalar supports arguments that move across scales, “as scholars are able to move from the microlevel of a project (perhaps a single image or video annotation) to the structure of the entire project and its integrated media. The researcher can create careful readings within a project of many components that can also be instantly represented as a whole collection."

Scalar's paths and tags were used to create and link the elements of Harlem in Disorder. Paths are sets of sequential pages, which can contain subpaths, or branching narratives. The chronological narrative that spans sections 3-6 is constructed using paths. Tags create categorical groupings, which can also refer to other tags to create linked groupings. The tag is the key to creating relationships that group the elements of this publication into scales of analysis and link and interweave data, categories, and narrative. Tags appear at the bottom of a page, making individual events a visible part of the sections of the chronological narrative in which they occurred, and of the multiple categories of which they are a part. On pages for individual events, tags make visible contexts for an event, including how many events are in each of those groupings (e.g., “Assaults (54)”). In other platforms, clicking on a tag takes a user to links to all of the pages that have that tag; in Scalar, clicking on a tag takes you to a page. As a page, a tag can be not just a means of connection and collection, but also a site for analysis and interpretation that itself can have tags that are used to create subcategories and multiple connections between elements of the argument.

This interactive structure lets a reader start by following the chronological narrative, then depart from it at a point of interest to focus on a specific event and arrive at a page that contains tags that link to more information about events related to that event in some way and notes that link to sources. Clicking on a tag takes you to a different layer of argument, or an analysis of a category of events. The ability to move across individual events and different groupings of events embodies the complexity of the disorder while also highlighting how the shape of that argument is the product of choices about how to categorize events identified in the sources. Wherever you are in the project, Scalar’s menu provides multiple options for finding your way: under the compass menu, a list of recent pages on which to retrace your path; and under the list menu, a table of contents that provides a way to return to a section in the chronological narrative or category or event in the other layers of argument, or to the thematic introduction that lays out the overall argument. Navigating in this way, you can explore the argument through a process of weaving, drawing threads out of the narrative and interlacing them until they form a pattern that shows the complex mix of forms into which racial violence changed in 1935 to create a wide-ranging challenge to white economic and political power.