Blue Harvest: The Beta Site

About this page

The Storyville Blue Book dataset, over 6000 lines long, provides a more tangible sense of the scale and density of Storyville relative to "musicking" -- social participation in music, per Christopher Small.  This data, compiled from the "Blue Book" directory holdings of the Historic New Orleans Collection, offers fuller context on the social and economic environment in which local musicians found work in Storyville, and it provides additional information on the participation of Storyville's women musicians, whose abilities were touted in the booklets' advertisements for individual locations in the district.

The typical organization of the Blue Books in this dataset is a directory of names organized alphabetically or by address, interspersed with a variety of ads including alcoholic beverages, law offices, venereal disease remedies, restaurants, undertakers, and featured locations such as those operated by Hilma Burt, Lulu White, and others. The enterprises of Tom Anderson and Josie Arlington are especially prominent among the advertisements.

Across 15 different booklets, one finds that the compilers were not meticulous about the correct spelling of names; many names are similar enough that, combined with other information, one may reasonably conclude two somewhat differing names are the same person. As far as it  has been possible to reconcile identities among inconsistent spellings, the dataset captures around 3000 individual women named in the booklets. The addition of variant names to the database entries is an ongoing process. Modern-day street names are used; for example, Customhouse Street is Iberville Street, Franklin is Crozat, and so on. Only two "Blue Books" have their exact year (1906 and 1907) printed on them, but it is possible to estimate dates based on other references. For example, the booklet with HNOC call number 94-092-RL notes the location of a forerunner of Storyville known as "Anderson County," placing it earlier in the existence of Storyville.

Using this page

By default, the full dataset will load, but it is possible to search in the text field at the upper right of the data table.  The data table structures information provided in the booklets, including name, address, demographic information, whether an individual is marked as the principal resident (owner, operator) under whose name the location is listed, and notes identifying women musicians and other information. The demographic markers, when they were provided, are presented as they appeared in the Blue Books.  Due to limits in the number individual map layers (one for each booklet) in Google's My Maps, the locations are presented in two maps below.

Known issues

Currently, the map coordinates plotted below are affected by a known issue, and some may appear shifted several blocks from their intended location. Corrections are ongoing. 

Project information

This dataset was compiled as part of a fellowship made possible by the IMLS Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian (LB21) grant (RE-254915OLS-23).  The contents originate in the collection of "Blue Book" guides to New Orleans' Storyville red light district which were  digitized by the Historic New Orleans Collection (HNOC). Optical character recognition (OCR) applied to the .pdf files of the booklets produced text for cleanup and arrangement as tabular data in OpenRefine.

Blue Book Data