Modules
Module 5: Global and Current Events
Shelley E. Rose
Key Questions
- What are the most prominent geographic issues in the recent news?
- What can geographers do to raise awareness about the importance of space and place in today’s world?
- How can geographers aid in the analysis of, and fight against, the spread of disease?
- What can geographers learn from historical examples of pandemics?
Class 1: Geography & the History of Medicine
View this approximately 50-minute lecture by Elizabeth Fenn, author of Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 (See this summary by Cameron Blevins for a synopsis of her book.) Visit this GIS visualization of her data and be prepared to discuss the value of this digital resource.
Module 5 | Lab 1
Read the following resources about mapping diseases. Many of them focus on one of the first uses of maps by Dr. John Snow in London’s 1854 Cholera Epidemic. Use them to answer these lab questions.
- Tom Koch, “Visualizing Disease,” ArcUser Online (Spring 2011)
- Angelica Haggert, “Tom Koch on disease mapping and medical geography,” Canadian Geographic, February 19, 2020.
- Yale Maps, “John Snow’s Map”
Lab Questions
- John Snow’s Cholera Map is both “narrative and analysis” according to John Theibault. Look at the ESRI map from Yale maps. What story does this map tell?
- How did John Snow use mapping to analyze a problem? Could Snow have come to the same conclusions without mapping?
- Who is the audience for Snow’s map?
- Read Angelica Haggert’s interview with Tom Koch in Canadian Geographic. How does Koch connect historical disease maps to the current efforts to map COVID-19?
