Hello! In this post I will be looking at two mapping projects and comparing them. The first is on the slave revolt in Jamaica from 1760-61 and the second is on lynching in America created by the Equal Justice Initiative.
Slave Revolt in Jamaica:
This project intends to give more information on the slave revolts based upon geography and the ways in which various groups moved. These maps are useful because we can track the paths made by self-emancipated people and the see revolts that took place in relation to each other. By looking at a map for this information we can see any physical barriers that would have been difficult to deal with such as mountains or waterways.
This map does have certain limitations such as using British maps as the base map which allows various colonial landmarks and labels to be used. It is also noted that by using maps, users don’t see the chaos and hardships occurring during these events and instead allow the viewer to take a step back from these events. There are also possible issues with the sources used to construct this map as the data used is taken from colonial sources and the rebel forces are difficult to track making some of the points on the map possibly incorrect.
Lynching In America:
This map tracks lynchings throughout the United States. This interactive map allows users to zoom into each state and see how many reported lynching there were in each county.
There are also points on the map that show specific victims and provides detailed information about their murder, as well as a short video about their life. The information below is about Calvin McDowell, William Stewart, and Thomas Moss, the business owners of Peoples Grocer in Memphis Tennessee who were murdered in 1892.
This interactive map is useful as it shows the distribution of lynchings in the United States. The map makes it very clear the areas of the United States where lynchings were more or less common. The information used to create this map is based on reported lynchings, meaning that there are more lynchings that really happened but because there is no documentation of them, they are not included on the map. There is also an issue with the way that the victims of lynchings are presented. People are represented by numbers in the county/state rather than having a name attached to each lynching on the map. This depersonalizes the data, while this information would be difficult to come by it would be useful if added to the map.
These two projects both use maps but in different ways. The slave revolt map tracks movement rather than the lynching map which tracks the amount of lynchings in each state. While there may be an interactive version of the slave revolt map it would not work for me so I relied on the images in the article about the map. The Lynching in America map was fully operational and easy to use. Both projects are useful but they each come with their own set of problems.
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