Caribbean Cholera Map

This week I analyzed the 19th Century Caribbean Cholera TimeMap. This site contains an interactive map of the Caribbean and the outbreaks of Cholera according to the timeline. It also contains a more specific location of Havana in 1833 to analyze the outbreak of this disease. The map focuses on four main variables which are the cholera outbreaks, hurricanes, tropical storms, and news articles. The variables are laid out by geography and year and visualized on the map and timeline.

Turnbull states that maps correlate with the subjectivity of the creator, therefore creating perspectival and subjective maps. Although maps may try to be created to take into account all factors, it is very hard to achieve due to the specificity of topics covered. This map gives an example of a map that is skewed to this understanding. For example, this map may make the causation of Cholera seem to be hurricanes and tropical storms since there is a limited amount of variables present on the map. Although this could be a cause of the outbreak, tropical storms is a very specific variable for such a large category of a disease to consider. Other variables that could contribute to the spread of the disease include transportation of goods (thus the transportation of the disease), climate, the health of the population, war/famine. These factors are all not taken into account on this map. The map is also skewed in a way that considers only a small location of the entire world. It could possibly make the reader think that Cholera was a very common disease in the 19^th century because there were three large outbreaks in the area.

The point of view of a map also highlights the subjectivity of the topic. The map was created by the Duke University Haiti Laboratory in Spring of 2011. One aspect of the map is the news articles published during the times of the outbreak that can be clicked on to read about the issue. Because the map was created by an American university, the majority of the publications highlighted in the map are American articles. These articles come from a point of view of people who live in different circumstances and areas then the Caribbean. Therefore these publications do not showcase the intensity of these outbreaks that were a cause of high amounts of death and trouble in the Caribbean. For example, the “Cholera in Havana (Spectator)” article states “the newspapers are silent on the subject”. A reader of this map may analyze this news article as if Cholera was not an important enough event to publish heavily in the news.

An alternate map that may represent this issue in a different way is focusing less on these natural disasters and news articles. Instead, it could still be a map that shows the fall and rise of population in the various areas of the Caribbean. In this way, it could show the intensity of death caused by Cholera outbreaks. This map would then show the effect rather than the cause of the disease. This map would also show how maps are subjective because although it is on the same topic, this map shows a completely new perspective than the one described above.