NOTE: Most of the content previously on this site has been removed while it is being revised for inclusion in a new Scalar project.
Stephen Robertson is using this site as a placeholder for Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935, a hypertext analysis of the racial violence that exploded in Harlem on March 19 and 20, 1935. Building on the award-winning Digital Harlem website to map the disorder, the project develops an innovative spatial analysis as an interpretive key to understanding the violence. The analysis is structured as a multi-layered, hyperlinked argument using the Scalar platform. Each layer offers a different scale of analysis: broad narratives, aggregated patterns, and individual events. Scalar allows these layers to be connected by tags which are not simply labels for categories of which the page is part or which it encompasses but links to pages. As such, tags can be used to describe as well as gather categories of information, providing an intermediary layer of pages between individual events and narratives and contexts.
The creation of the Scalar publication is supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication for 2021-2022. Harlem in Disorder is under contract to be published by Stanford University Press in its Digital Projects series.
Harlem in Disorder began as part of the Year of the Riot project, a collaboration with Shane White and Stephen Garton, with research assistance from Conor Hannon, and Anna Lebovic at the University of Sydney. Nicole Cook and Benjamin Mackey at George Mason University provided additional research assistance. A related website offers a customized view of our research database which uses the Heurist knowledge management system, developed by Ian Johnson and Artem Osmakov (University of Sydney Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences).
Year of the Riot was supported by a Discovery Grant, DP110104268, from the Australian Research Council, and a University of Sydney Bridging Support Grant.
