The Map as Intent: Variations on the Theme of John Snow (original) (raw)
Related papers
Essential, Illustrative, or … Just Propaganda? Rethinking John Snow's Broad Street Map
Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, 2010
For more than a century John Snow's iconic map of an 1854 cholera outbreak in the Broad Street area of Soho, London, has been the very definition of how to discover the source of a disease. Some now argue, however, that the map was merely an illustrative and not very imaginative graphic. Here we argue that this position is incorrect. Snow's mapping of the Broad Street outbreak produced a spatial argument that was a critical evidentiary statement. This position requires us to ask, If that is true, is the map in part responsible for Snow's inability to convince contemporaries of his argument that cholera was water-borne and not airborne? In doing so, we use mid-nineteenth-century methodologies to demonstrate that the problem was not in the map but in Snow's handling of the data. This review of a seminal study in the history of disease studies not only informs historical perspective but, in its conclusions, speaks to the utility of medical mapping in contemporary disease studies, where spatialization of a disease event remains a critical method of investigation.
Crediting his critics' concerns: Remaking John Snow's map of Broad Street cholera, 1854
Social Science & Medicine, 2009
Few cases in the history of epidemiology and public health are more famous than John Snow's investigation of a neighborhood cholera outbreak in the St. James, Westminster, area of London in 1854. In this study Snow is assumed to have proven that cholera was water rather than airborne through a methodology that became, and to a great extent remains, central to the science and social science of disease studies. And yet, Snow's work did not satisfy most of his contemporaries who considered his proof of a solely waterborne cholera interesting but unconvincing. Uniquely, this paper asks whether the caution of Snow's contemporaries was reasonable, and secondly, whether Snow might have been more convincing within the science of the day. The answers significantly alter our understanding of this paradigmatic case. It does so in a manner offering insights both into the origins of nineteenth century disease analysis and more generally, the relation of mapping in the investigation of an outbreak of uncertain origin. The result has general relevancedpedagogically and practicallydin epidemiology, medical geography, and public health.
J-Reading, 2019
This article focuses on the map drawn for Street Geography. Drawing Cities for a Sustainable Future (SG), a geo-artistic project realised in Padua in September 2018. The article reads maps from a processual perspective and focuses on the SG map as both a cartographic object and a set of related ongoing practices, further presenting the scope, themes and main actors of the SG project to explore the reasons for the realisation and use of a map in this specific creative context. The first part of the paper starts with the use of the word mapping in contemporary cartographic theories, shifting attention from data-driven cartography to emergent and cultural cartography. The second part of the paper explores the origin, design and afterlives of the SG map from an emergent perspective by retracing the different phases of the mapping process, from map-making to map-use. Not only mapping practices but even stories, memories and emotions continuously unfold from maps. Therefore, the second part of the paper recounts the story of the SG map from an internal, autoethnographic perspective that explores the issues of intersubjective collaboration and authorship, production, dissemination and reception that are connected to this cartographic object. This paper aims "to capture how maps emerge" (Dodge et al., 2009, p. 231), to explore more thoroughly not only the performative, participatory and political nature of the SG map but also its affective understandings.
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The location map printed on the back page of the RGS-IBG 2007 Annual International Conference programme prompted us to think again about the place of maps in the Geography discipline in the UK. This mundane representation, simply showing the streets of the West End of London and the conference venues as oversized push-pins, was taken from Google Maps 1 . RGS-IBG is a 'world leading' geographical organisation with a long history of involvement in the state of the art of mapping. The
Artl@s Bulletin 7, no. 2 , 2018
Maps have the special capacity to create and project spatial frameworks through both their physical and stylistic forms. The close study of maps as constructed objects re-centers the principle element of any art historical problem, relational thinking through visual culture. A cartographic representation examined as an element of its historical context can simultaneously articulate a specific perspective on a particular place, and reveal broader dialogues of which that viewpoint is one part. The articles brought together here examine a variety of local mappings contingent on more global thinking in the transatlantic world, from the colonial period to the twentieth century.
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Today the scientific world shows great interest in visual culture. This is a transversal phenomenon to national disciplines and contexts, given that the same tendency to reorient knowledge and organize it around visual paradigms is to be found in different areas of contemporary western thought. In this reevaluation of the visual culture is collocated the present rediscovery of the heuristic value of the geographical map, the use of which today has undoubtedly crossed the narrow ambit of geographical studies to find growing use with specialists of other disciplines too, attracted by the capacity of maps to synthetically highlight significant spatial correlations of the phenomena being studied. Nonetheless, like every scientific instrument it comes up with processes of adaptation to the changing scientific contexts, just as the traditional Cartesian configuration of the map needs to be updated in order to be in line with the new post-modern scientific paradigms and with the reality of...