Mapping Prohibition: The Challenges of Digitally (Re)creating Historical Spaces

Hannah C. Griggs

hannahgriggs@gmail.com Boston College

This poster will explore the challenges of creating digitized historical spaces
as faced through the design and subsequent exhibition of the interactive,
open-access map, Prohibition Raids in New Orleans, 19191933. During
Prohibition, Federal agents (or ‘Prohis') raided thousands of establishments
throughout the city of New Orleans, arresting thousands more. Using data
gleaned from The Times-Picayune, one of New Orleans's oldest newspapers, this
map documents the

proliferation of these raids through the 1920s into the

early 1930s. Currently housed in The Museum of the American Cocktail in New
Orleans, this exhibit is a collaboration between the Southern Food and Beverage
Museum and my digital humanities project, In-temperance.org, an Omeka archive
of cocktail culture in New Orleans. The goals and questions raised by this
project will be presented in this poster. These include:

1.    Summarizing the historical context of the project and considering the
ways in which early 20th century New Orleans constructed and created spaces of
leisure, as well as assessing the cultural importance of the bars, restaurants,
residences, and other locales raided by Prohibition agents;

2.    Exploring how to turn historical spaces into modern spaces in ways that
are intuitive and accessible to diverse audiences and different publics;

3. Optimizing user experience for those viewers unfamiliar with the historical
information presented and/or the digital plat-form(s) with which the exhibit
was created;

4. Acknowledging the limitations of visualization and user experience of
digitized historical spaces.

As a project rooted in Public History, the challenge of achieving the
aforementioned goals lay in the digital platform. This poster will explain the
exhibit's functionality goals and specific interactivity issues encountered
during the exhibition's creation. This includes the ability to

• optionally read a description of the exhibit and summarized history;

• view details of each individual Prohibition raid;

• organize and view raids by year;

• filter by type of establishment raided;

• zoom in, zoom out, and view the page in full.

In order to achieve these goals, the exhibit was initially built in Neatline
using the Starter Theme from Scholars' Lab, which works capably on any
modern browser. Neatline advantageously allows users to explore the breadth of
the historical archive by connecting Neatline points to Omeka items. When
displayed on the Museum's multitouch tablet, however, issues of mobile
compatibility and long loading times resulted in poor user experience.
Ultimately, we had to modify the exhibition by changing the visualization
platform to Tableau Public. Tableau not only circumvents the mobile
compatibility issues found with Neatline, but it allows users to interactively
filter historical data by year and raid type, a feature not currently possible
in Neatline.

While both Neatline and Tableau are capable platforms to achieve these goals,
each has its own advantages. With these specific goals in mind, this poster
will furthermore compare and contrast the advantages and limitations of
Neatline and Tableau Public as both mobile and desktop interfaces. This poster

will furthermore highlight the exhibition's successful outcomes as well as the
limitations of its interactivity. Much could be learned about visualization
from the challenges faced in the creation of this exhibition.