For our first assignment, we made a timeline related to the history of information visuals. In readings from the first class, there was mention of disease maps. I was captivated. I’d never thought disease maps in depth other than ones I’d seen in history books. This assignment helped me contextualize and appreciate the often-lifesaving importance of these maps at the time of their invention in the late 1700s.
Plague maps, I found, grew in popularity concurrent with the rise of the printing press. These visualizations could be easily printed then distributed to many people in a given area. In the 1800s, people could look at these mass-produced maps and know who had died and where; this aided people by mapping outbreak-common areas. Disease maps were universal during this times—the printing press allowed even the “lowliest” of people could enjoy this innovation (most print materials, books, etc. were reserved for the rich) at the very moment of their invention. In this way, disease maps are unique in my opinion. Despite the grim circumstances in which they were most necessary, disease maps fascinated me enough to make a timeline about them.
The slideshow starts at the very beginning. Valentine Seaman’s visualization about Yellow Fever was created in 1798. This map was used to determine that outbreaks were coming from ship cargo. This first example illustrates another thing that fascinated me about these disease maps. They are not just great at telling people places to avoid in order to stay uninfected—they also aid inquisitive minds in finding out solutions.
Another slide was devoted to Berghaus’s ambitious world disease map, in which a ton of diseases were mapped across a representation of the entire world. It must have been hard to communicate and retrieve information from what we now consider short distances then. Berghaus retrieved so much data about countries so far apart from him and also one another. I was impressed by the scope of this, especially considering it was 1848.
It felt appropriate that a slideshow about disease maps would be under the umbrella of the 1800s. I was finding that the bulk of diseases/maps/cartographers listed in my slides came from this century. More specifically, many important milestones took place in the 1850s, which makes me think this decade represented some kind of zenith for disease maps. Other events from this period include Dr. John Snow’s cholera map of London and Florence Nightingale’s Crimean War research that led to important conclusions about soldier health. Other slides rounding out the century were devoted to visuals related to Civil War syphilis rates and measles.
The twentieth century and on were kind of an after-thought for this slideshow. Maybe it would have been more concise to only have visual data from this century, but something felt right about leading it up to now. I ended with slides about polio, West Nile, and Zika rates.
It felt important to incorporate the actual maps in the slideshow. But I really like history, and I didn’t think having exclusively pictures of the maps themselves would be interesting. For one, they are all similarly-colored (limitations of print back then?/discoloration?). Providing historical context with real images from the corresponding years (whether it be pictures of events or figures surrounding the diseases) felt like a way to make things more appealing. In keeping with the timeline format, which seems to favor shorter descriptions, not much description felt necessary. Amazingly, the visuals speak for themselves—even ones that are three hundred years old hold up and do the job just as well as any winded description could.
For my pictures, I looked at a lot of creative commons stuff. This was intentional, but also made a lot of sense. Old pictures of people afflicted with a disease or portraits of key players on this topic helped switch things up. I also only wanted media that corresponded to the times reflected in the timeline. This means if the timeline point was from “1896,” I would only use a photo from that era. Using a visual from now, reflecting something from way back when, felt dishonest.
Another resource I found super helpful was a personal site of Brian Altonen who, despite the modest claim that his page isn’t supposed to be an all-encompassing resource, actually created a very comprehensive timeline of these historical maps. Mr. Altonen, a biostatistician and lowkey disease map expert, provided an invaluable guide that helped in fleshing out my timeline with only the most notable graphs and events. For modern examples of disease represented by visuals, I took media from places like NPR and Wikimedia Commons. Easy, dependable, straight-forward sources that are hard to argue with
Looking over the timeline, there are many small things like misspelling and typos that I would change with a revision. And though I wanted all my pictures/media to correspond exactly with the years, the picture on the Yellow Fever slide was taken twenty years after the visualization I wrote about was made. I also could’ve had the Zika or West Nile slides have media that is more reflective of the advancements of the times. Maybe a video or some kind of moving visualization would’ve been better for these slides. A video or some more-complicated visual aid, in the context of this slideshow, might not make sense with plague-related events from the 1800s. But it would be fitting in one about modern diseases.
In short, future revisions to this graph would include more-polished grammar. Finer attention would be paid to pictures and words corresponding more precisely within each slide. I’d also incorporating loftier info visuals and add more recent disease representations to show all the different ways we map disease now, assuming there are a lot of new ones.
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