I read an article yesterday evening related to John Snow and Edmund Cooper’s initial mapping of cholera. When Cooper first did a map on the outbreak of cholera, it was found to be too detailed and its meaning was lost by the sheer amount of data. The article I read involved researchers and scientists trying to map out the plague of frogs due to a fungus called batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. The fungus is currently causing fungal infection to the frogs in an interactive way. Unlike how Snow created a map that conveyed its information efficiently by reducing information, the map currently being created has too little information and needs improvement by adding more. This is because scientists want to include different types of fungi to the map in order to anticipate potential infectious outbreaks.

Another factor these researchers must face is accuracy. In the case of plagues that affect humans, it’s quite easy to find records and conduct interviews in order to find out the age and location of the deceased. However, when researching animals, certain factors must be taken into account, such as verification of an outbreak. Since anyone is allowed to upload data to the map, it may provide unreliable information. It is, in a way, a crude version of Johnson’s explanation of NYC’s 311 service where the city uses people as their eyes and ears. Yet when animals are used in the equation, it’s hard to get a truly effective map. Then it places the designers of the map in a dilemma: is it better to have a slow stream of reliable data during a plague, or is it better to rely on crowdsourcing to get a larger intake of data, where some cases of a plague outbreak in an area are true and other cases are false?

Article discussed: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/mapping-a-plague-of-frogs/?gwh=BC9B774A73D5172AEA315A791B1E2942