An award-winning component of the Black Metropolis: Harlem collaborative research project, whose goal is to “produce an ethnographic study of everyday life in Harlem as it became the black capital of the world.”

The Digital Harlem website presents information, drawn from legal records, newspapers and other archival and published sources, about everyday life in New York City’s Harlem neighbourhood (primarily arrests and related court records) in the years 1915–1930 (Black Metropolis’ ARC project). The database is being extended with a specific study of the events of 1935 (‘Year of the Riot’ ARC project).

Winner of the American Historical Association’s 2010  Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History, and the American Library Association’s 2010 ABC-CLIO Online History Award.

The Digital Harlem database was converted to Heurist in 2013 and the DigitalHarlem.org website is generated directly from the database using Heurist interface widgets. Buttons and searches are saved as data in the Heurist database so that only the cosmetics of the interface are fixed code (html and javascript).