Mapping Cholera on display at Germ City at the Museum of the City of New York

Germ City: Mapping Cholera in NYC

Our Mapping Cholera data visualization is currently on display at the Museum of the City of New York as part of the Germ City: Microbes and the Metropolis exhibit, so I wanted to share a bit of background on the project.

The Germ City exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York runs until late April 2019

Cholera is not something we associate with modern NYC, but in the first half of the 19th century Cholera epidemics were a regular occurrence as you can see in this graphic from the exhibition.

Cholera epidemics hit NYC hard in the first half of the 19th century

Narrated by science journalist and prize-winning author, Sonia Shah, and funded by the Pulitzer Center, Mapping Cholera explains why conditions at the time were so favorable to Vibrio cholerae.

The original visualization was built for Scientific American in 2014 using Mapbox.js and a dataset that Sonia had uncovered during her research that we geocoded using a historical map from the New York Public Library’s Map Warper project.

The Museum particularly liked the time series animations in the original, so I created some updated plots using Mapbox GL (which didn’t exist in 2014) specifically for the exhibit.

Mapping Cholera at Germ City: Microbes and the Metropolis

The Germ City exhibit is on display until late April 2019. It’s well worth a visit.

Maptian is a mapping and data visualization studio. If you’re looking for help visualizing data around disease and epidemics, drop us a line at hello@maptian.com.