Digital Harlem forms one part of a collaborative research project on everyday life in Harlem between 1915 and 1930 undertaken by four historians in the Department of History at the University of Sydney, in Australia: Shane White, Stephen Garton, Graham White, and Stephen Robertson, with the assistance of Delwyn Elizabeth, Nick Irving, Michael Thompson, Conor Hannan, and Anna Lebovic.
Unlike most studies of Harlem in the early twentieth century, 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 systematically exploring a sample of legal records and black newspapers.