Parallel pandemics

It turns out that pandemics are everywhere. In 2019 I was working on my sabbatical project, experimenting with various methods of visualizing data, one of which was Story Maps. I needed a workable idea to coalesce around a geographical theme, but early on, two of my favourite prospects (Proust; and Robert Moses’s Long Island) were ruled out as overly ambitious. Gradually my attention turned to the town on Eyam which has garnered a bit of fame as the “Plague Village”.

Using Eyam as a starting point, I became embroiled reading DeFoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, which (when I was in university as an accidental English major), had never been on my To Read list. Far from it. Who would want to read a year’s long account of experiencing life during a plague? Not exactly my cup of British tea.

But I was fascinated with the statistics DeFoe uses, and bonus! there was a map of the London districts during the 17th century which would facilitate my being able to determine their location. Hallelujah! My theme had started to reveal itself.

But back in 2019, just outside my window, an unnervingly weird thing was happening: an actual pandemic was starting to grip the world. I hunkered down even more and continued on with my Story Map project.

There are many parallel themes between 17th century plague and contemporary attitudes. Here are a few:

• quarantines of homes (i.e., the “shutting up of houses”)- 40 days in length
• avoidance of quarantine rules (escaping quarantines; bribes)
• avoiding others esp when outdoors; covering nose and mouth
• profitable peddling of worthless treatments
• health certificates for travel
• role of local government to keep society functioning
• reduction of business and property debts of plague affected proprietors
• the publication of weekly and annual plague statistics, eg deaths

Check out the story map.

A Plague on your Data: a storymap experiment

publicly accessible at

https://arcg.is/zn9Da

Eyam Hall by deadmanjones, licensed under CC-BY-NC 2.0

My posted selected bibliography of the sources used

Plague on your data Storymap: a Bibliography

on Figshare