The Roaring Twenties
Reviewed by: Theodore Daniel Manning
Review started: February 26, 2023
Review last updated: May 1, 2023
Site Link
Data and Sources
- Digitized 1920s New York map from the City of New York and help from Princeton University.
- Film clips from the Moving Image Research Collections.
- Noise complaints from the City of New York.
Processes
- Unavailable; website is still a draft.
Presentation
- Downloadable files which contain archives of photos
- Searchable files by tag with displayed photo results
Digital Tools Used
- Unknown
Languages
- English
Review
The Roaring Twenties is a digitization of noise complaints, presented as text copied from the original documents, and newsreels mapped to New York City in the 1920s. The project (created in 2013) seems to be one of personal import to its creator, Emily Thompson, a historian of sound, and Scott Mahoy, who has little online presence, although their LinkedIn seems to suggest they were the creative director of this project. The project was further revised with an additional creator, Ben Johnston, who is a Digital Humanist and Educational Technologist at Princeton. The project is being currently edited, although it’s unclear if the data collection itself is ongoing (I would assume not since information and collections of these documents are quite limited). It was produced through the Vectors Journal and McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning at Princeton University. It seeks to create an archive that contextualizes these noise complaints that are filed, and the project’s primary researcher Dr. Thompson states in the Intro multiple times how beneficial this work would be for not only historians but for the public to ‘visualize’ such a soundscape which is as noisy as our own. This work has been written about in one publication that I can find, Dr. Thompson’s own book The Soundscape of Modernity.
This project is so cool to work with, even for someone who’s not in the field, but it seems to have been seriously hampered by the discontinuation of Adobe Flash. The hover on words isn’t quite right so you can misclick, menus hover awkwardly so you have to chase down your selection like a game of cat and mouse, and videos don’t stop playing sound when you close them.
The user can switch between sorting of noise complaints by where they took place, when they took place, or what the noise is, which is so cool to visualize. Further, they have noise complaints viewable with or without documentation, and with or without a newsreel. Transcriptions are also available, and it works across desktop browsers, however it does not have mobile functionality.
In terms of outreach strategy, there doesn’t seem to be much to speak of, perhaps due to the project’s current draft status. However, I would love to see further dissemination of this project; I’m aware of many people with a niche interest in this place and/or time period on Tumblr, for example, who would love to see such a project. I also believe this project would do well on TikTok, as there is a whole community interested in history there (especially studying high school students–an important demographic to reach), and the platform itself is based on sound. Who would’ve thought about archiving soundscapes? Not me!