For this week’s blog post, I chose to analyze the 19th-Century Cuban Cholera Time Map
I liked that this map separated three distinct time periods for the peaks of outbreaks during the 19th-century, rather than one giant chunk, as it allows us to focus on each portion’s history differently from each other. The outbreaks were from: 1833-1834, 1850-1856, and 1865-1872. The map reveals locations of the outbreaks with a little location marker and some articles tagged in. However, I don’t really like this method of representing something as awful as, Cholera, as it feels removed. I suppose this map may reflect the point of view of its creator, in that the cholera map may just be another data set visualized. I’m sure many people died as a result of these outbreaks but the impact of that human suffering isn’t quite visually present proportional to the disease. I wish it was more of a heat map that dedicated population death density by location, rather than locations of where articles were written about.
Additionally, since this map is dependent on the locations of articles, it’s assumed that only locations that are written are where the outbreaks took place. Writing, historically, is a knowledge that is more privileged than other methods of disseminating information – and perhaps people of that area did not have the privilege of being written about, and thus remembered and documented in this map.
The pinpoints of data aren’t even full articles – they’re just little excerpts of some sad data that seem almost hush-hush about the violence and deaths. For example: “It reached Matanzas about the middle of March, and although the papers are silent on the subject, private letters have been received that leave no doubt of the disease in that place. Only about 150 persons have fallen victims to it. At Havana it continued to rage with unabated violence. The average of deaths is computed at from 350 to 500 daily, and on the 18th of March was 600. The whole number of victims is estimated at more than 10,000!”
Those are HUGE numbers that seem to be largely neglected by the media, and I’m assuming it is because many (if not most) of the victims were slaves. Understandably, the articles are old and curt, so it is hard to accurately depict how many victims died when and where, but it would have humanized the event more to display a heat map, rather than just locations.