Mapping Crisis: a reflection on the Covid-19 pandemic

This book is being published in the midst of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, an event that was beyond the imagination of most people at the time that the project started, but one that now grips the world and is one of the principal factors in how we presently organise our daily existence. It was suggested that we might add some information to the book about these changes and how they relate to the stories and research contained within. After much thought, it was felt that this preface was a more suitable space for such reflection. While there is no doubt at all that many of the chapters within this book could have easily been about the response to the Covid-19 outbreak, to insert this new narrative would have been to erode the experiences of those people who feature in these chapters. While the pandemic has rightly become a focus of much of the planet, it has already drawn our attention away from other inequalities and struggles around the world. This book though, despite being almost entirely finished before the pandemic was declared, has much to teach us about how we might respond to this global crisis. The pandemic, and our response to this crisis, has thrown up a great many questions in relation to how we use, collect, map and understand data, many of which are explored in these chapters.

Epidemiology and mapping have a long history, with early examples being Shapter’s 1832 maps of cholera in Exeter, UK, and then the more famous maps of cholera deaths produced by John Snow in London. These maps and their authors were credited with bringing new understanding of waterborne disease and saving many lives. While now we often look back on these maps as being unquestionably useful and accurate, the results of the map production, rather than their process is what is what sticks in our minds. Yet, it is important to remember that at the time these maps were widely dismissed, and often misinterpreted as supporting the prevailing thoughts of the time that cholera was airborne. Indeed, Snow’s maps become more famous than Shapter’s not only because they were of London, but because of the evocative story of him striding in to Broad Street and tearing off the handle of the community water pump – an act required precisely because his data and mappings were not initially well received. As the world grapples with mapping and tracing the Covid-19 pandemic, the data and maps produced are also questioned by those who observe them. Data is being used to drive the daily movements of billions of people in a way that we have never before seen, but the interpretations and collection of this data are wholly problematic – doctors and politicians looking at the same data draw wildly different conclusions about the course of action. People are being instructed to stay home, go to work, wear masks, or send their children to school based on the invisible hand of data. While I do not suggest we shouldn’t be harnessing all the tools we can in the fight to save lives during this pandemic, it has also brought many issues of ‘mapping crisis’ to the fore. Issues of privacy, control, vicarious mapping, the datafication of people, incomplete data, dark data, prejudice in reading data, and inequality of access – even in the richest countries, those without a smartphone will be omitted from any digital tracing apps designed to protect people.

This book is not about epidemiology, it is about mapping many other moments of crisis, but the stories within foretell these issues. Throughout the book the authors explore and challenge the way in which people are mapped and turned into data when they are at their most vulnerable – in moments of crisis. These chapters explore the politics within data and ask why there is such uneven distribution. In asking these questions though, this book also offers solutions and hope. From active counter-mapping projects that show how to include voices and peoples often marginalised, to warnings of where things can so often go wrong, there are many lessons within these pages to guide us through using data to tackle the Covid-19 crisis.

Covid-19 has brought the world of data-driven crisis management to the doorstep of the whole world, but these are not new experiences. People around the world have already been reduced to data points, and had their lives dictated by algorithm, computation, and the biases built into these technologies. Many more are also pushing back with counter mapping and participatory practices that aim to force the inclusion of subjugated voices and knowledge. This book then is about those who have already been mapped or made maps in times of crisis, and through these pages lie many of the critical questions, and some of the answers, to mapping the Covid-19 pandemic.

Doug Specht