Gemini Revised Workflow
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Gemini Revised Workflow
💡 Concept
In the 19th century, before the widespread acceptance of germ theory, public health officials grappled with devastating cholera epidemics. To understand these outbreaks, they turned to spatial data visualization. While John Snow's 1854 map of the Broad Street pump is famous for isolating a waterborne source, earlier efforts—like Edwin Chadwick's sanitary map of Leeds and Boston's 1849 cholera tracking—reveal how officials tried to correlate disease with the environment, poverty, and sanitation. Often, these maps were designed to prove the "miasma" theory (that disease was spread by foul air from poor drainage) rather than tainted water.
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🖥️ Activity
In this lab, you will use the Mirador IIIF viewer to conduct a side-by-side comparative analysis of two early epidemiological maps: Chadwick's Sanitary Map of Leeds and the 1849 map tracking the course of cholera in Boston. You will act as a historical epidemiologist, decoding the visual language used by 19th-century cartographers to "plot death."
📍 Location
Canvas Discussion Board
👓 Examples
Think about how modern COVID-19 dashboards use color gradients and heat maps to show infection rates. 19th-century mapmakers had to invent these data visualization techniques from scratch, experimenting with shading, dots, and annotations to tell a story about public health.
🧱 Materials
- Map 1: Chadwick's sanitary map of Leeds (Sourced via Wellcome Collection)
- Map 2: Course of cholera in Boston in 1849 (Sourced via Digital Commonwealth)
🛠️ Tools
Use the embedded Mirador 3 Viewer below to deep-zoom into the high-resolution IIIF manifests of both maps.
Text-Based Visual Description (For Screen Readers)
Chadwick's Sanitary Map of Leeds: A dense, color-coded street map of Leeds, England. The map uses shaded zones to indicate the varying living conditions and sanitation levels of different neighborhoods, heavily emphasizing areas with poor drainage and "foul air," reflecting the miasma theory of disease transmission.
Course of Cholera in Boston (1849): A map of the Boston peninsula focusing on the 1849 outbreak. It uses distinct visual markers to plot individual cases or clusters of cholera across the city's wards, highlighting the spatial relationship between the disease and the city's contemporary waterfronts and crowded districts.
🪜 Steps
- Interact with the Mirador viewer above. Use your mouse or trackpad to zoom closely into the street-level details of both maps.
- On the Leeds map, locate the legend or key (if visible) and identify what environmental factors Chadwick was prioritizing (e.g., drainage, housing density).
- On the Boston map, observe where the cholera markers are most heavily clustered. Are they near water? In specific neighborhoods?
- Take a screenshot of one specific area from either map that you find particularly revealing about 19th-century data visualization.
✉️ Share
Post by Thursday at 11:59 PM
Write a 250-word response addressing the following prompts:
- Embed the screenshot you took during your analysis.
- Based on the visual evidence in these maps, what did the mapmakers believe was causing the spread of cholera? Support your answer with specific visual details (e.g., "The mapmaker emphasized X, which suggests they believed Y").
- How does their method of visualizing data differ from how we map public health crises today?
🤝 Collaborate
Interact by Sunday at 11:59 PM
Reply to at least two classmates. In your replies, compare their screenshot and analysis with your own. Did they notice a structural or environmental detail that you missed? How does their interpretation of the cartographer's intent add to your understanding of the historical moment?
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