Projects in focus: archive
APRIL
Digital Harlem: Everyday Life 1915-1930
APRIL
Written by Professor Elizabeth Webby
With funding provided by a large ARC Linkage Grant and industry partner the Copyright Agency Limited, a team at the University of Sydney, based in the English Department and Fisher Library, have since mid 2007 been developing APRIL: The Australian Poetry Resources Internet Library. This site aims to increase the circulation, reading and understanding of Australian poetry within Australia and internationally by providing reliable reading texts of a wide range of poems by contemporary and earlier writers as well as much contextual and critical material, including interviews, photographs and recordings.
The APRIL website will incorporate works by 76 nineteenth and early twentieth century Australian poets which were digitised as part of earlier projects by Fisher Library’s SETIS team. A further 170 poets whose work remains in copyright have been selected for inclusion in the first stage of the APRIL project. So far 70 of these poets, or their estates, have agreed to allow their work to be featured on the site, including such major figures as David Malouf, John Tranter, John Kinsella, Dorothy Hewett and Dorothy Porter. Digitisation of their poems is now underway. With the assistance of staff from PARADISEC and Performance Studies work is also being carried out on the digital conversion of video and audio taped interviews with poets made in the 1980s and 1990s.
Collaboration with the Copyright Agency Limited and use of new Digital Object Identifier technology will allow authors to receive payment for material still in copyright, thus solving one of the major problems associated with making this material accessible on the Internet.
The inspiration for the APRIL project came from poet and editor John Tranter who designed and built a prototype site in 2004, which he actively developed through 2005 and 2006. This can currently be viewed at april.edu.au.
| John Tranter
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Audio file: John Tranter reads his poem Invitation to America. |
Digital Harlem: Everyday Life 1915-1930
Written by Dr. Stephen Robertson
Digital Harlem: Everyday 1915-1930 forms part of an ARC supported collaborative research project, Black Metropolis: Harlem 1915-1930, being undertaken by Shane White, Stephen Garton, Stephen Robertson and Graham White, from the Department of History. That project aims to produce an ethnographic portrait of Harlem in the period in which the arrival of migrants from the south and the West Indies transformed the neighbourhood into the Negro Mecca, the greatest black city in the world. Unlike most studies of the neighborhood, this project focuses not on black artists and the black middle class, but on the lives of ordinary African New Yorkers. It does so primarily by using the case files of the Manhattan District Attorney, which reveal all manner of things that would not ordinarily be labelled ‘criminal’– street life, black language, music, family life – as well as evidence of the role of gambling, violence and confidence men in the black community. In addition, it draws on probation files, prison records, undercover investigations, social surveys, census schedules and the two major newspapers published in Harlem, The New York Age and The Amsterdam News.
Image of Digital Harlem interface
The project employs digital technology to integrate these sources and to visualize and explore the spatial dimensions of everyday life in Harlem. It does so by means of the Digital Harlem site, which allows the mapping of the information gathered in a database.
Image of database behind Digital Harlem
Whereas a traditional historical map is static, those in Digital Harlem have the advantage of being dynamic. The database can be searched for, and the interface can then map, particular places or types of location, events, where an individual lived his/her life, or moments in time – or any combination of such data. For example, we have generated maps of the sites of nightlife, assaults, the locations that feature in life of a black teenager – his homes, workplaces, where he played basketball, swam, and had sex with his girlfriend – and events that occurred in January 1925 (see image). Clicking on any of the icons of the map links you to the associated database record. When site is complete, and sufficient data to be useful has been added to the database, the site will become available to the public.
Image of map of events in January 1925 created in Digital Harlem
Both the database and the map interface were designed for us by Damien Evans of the Archaeological Computing Laboratory (ACL), and refined over a period of more than a year as we added data, integrated additional types of data and developed a clearer sense of what we could use the map to visualize and analyze. Andrew Wilson of the ACL created an overlay of building footprints for the map, which can be turned on and off, based on information in fire insurance maps from the 1920s and 1930s.
