I decided to take a look at the Caribbean Cholera Map. There wasn’t any background information provided related to the creation of this map so my analysis will be just based off of the map itself.
The map timeline did not really provide much humanistic insight on the cholera outbreak. The timeline mainly consisted of the duration of different cholera outbreaks with occasional descriptions of newspaper headlines related to the outbreaks. It also included instances of different hurricanes and tropical storms. Looking at this data, I’m under the impression that the creator was only concerned about looking at the cholera outbreak as a whole during the time period 1833-1872. The only descriptive information about the outbreak comes from the perspective of a newspaper reporter and even so the newspaper reports were trying to summarize the cholera outbreak into a couple of sentences. In a way I felt like I was reading a doctor’s diagnosis of a patient- short and straight to the point, only including information relevant to the illness. Seeing that the creator also information about the hurricane and the storms, I also predict that the creator was trying to find a relationship between the outbreak and the different types of storms. This timeline does a good job on reporting the patterns of the cholera outbreaks in the Caribbean – although I do wonder if the cases shown on the map were the only cases- and maybe even showing the relationship between the outbreak and the different storms. On the other hand, it doesn’t do a good job on what the life might have been like in the areas that did have the outbreaks. However, it might have been difficult to portray that information on a map that tried to illustrate the cholera outbreak across the entire Caribbean. An alternative to solve that problem is to find a specific location to report on. Then it would be easier to depict the details of the outbreak and the impact that it had on the different societies; the map could include the pictures from that time and have a density map to portray how many people had been affected by the outbreak. I do think that this method also has additional problems since it would be getting rid of the potential to relay information about the Caribbean as a whole.
I agree the project is definitely limited. It’s interesting I tried learning more about their sources and methods by going on their about page, but they don’t seem to have finished it yet because none of the links work. I feel like the overall project is lacking in that respect then, not just the map.
All good points! I think the map could be improved if it was limited to the area from Mexico to the Atlantic (left to right) and U.S. East Coast to Venezuela (top to bottom). This range of focus could be achieved by specifying the zoom in and out range on Google Maps. The styling of the map is also very similar to the basemap for Google Maps, and has lots of extra geographical information which distracts from the Cholera narrative.