Diaries and Rhythmic Behavior in Nineteenth-Century New York City, Techniques in Visualizing and Mapping Periodicity in Daily Life.

Kenneth Scherzer, Emeritus, Middle Tennessee State University

Employing modified “activity paths” first devised by sociologists, this paper outlines an approach to systematizing the use of historical diaries to study structures of urban life as overlapping patterns of weekly, seasonal, and annual activities that allow comparisons among diverse, often idiosyncratic journals. Standardizing entries reveal latent patterns in “city use” involving healthcare, trade and social seasons, residential moves, churchgoing, neighboring, the domestic economy, and work. It argues that the value of diaries comes from their power of description and as a comprehensive time series to be visualized and mapped to study the relationship between time and space. Geocoding and mapping addresses and travel routes demonstrate how a wide range of city dwellers--wives of merchants and lawyers, shop clerks, tradesmen, upwardly bound schoolboys, lowly office boys, well-born attorneys, cigarmakers, and a prominent industrialist-developer—navigated the city and its environs. Dynamic heat maps reveal, among other things, shifts in work, shopping, the utilization of transportation, social activity, entertainment, and summer escape between the 1790s and the end of the nineteenth century.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 190. New York City: Mapping Social History