lindbrook 2024-03-30
In his map of the 1854 cholera outbreak in London, John Snow uses stacks of bars to represent the number of fatalities at a given address. A location with one fatality is represented by a single, horizontal bar that lies parallel to road where the fatality occurred. A location with five fatalities is represented by five horizontally stacked bars:1
In 1992, Rusty Dodson and Waldo Tobler digitized the map. Their data and software are preserved in Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.2 Their data are also available in Michael Friendly’s ‘HistData’ R package, which is the starting point for the ‘cholera’ package. These data are plotted below:
Each bar and pump is assigned a unique x-y coordinate. Each road is translated into a series of straight line segments, defined by the segment’s endpoints. These data are plotted below:
Despite its appeal, I would argue that stacked bars are visually and computationally problematic. The reason, simply put, is that not all bars are created equal. Even though they are identical in terms of their appearance and the only thing that appears to distinguish them is their location, bars can actually play different roles.
Sometimes a bar represents the location of a fatality, sometimes it doesn’t. Standalone bars, a stack with a single bar (i.e., an addresses with one fatality), or the bar at the base of a stack represent a location and a count. Bars above the base case do not. They exist only to create the stacking effect to visually represent the number of fatalities at the address.
This duality is problematic. Because a map is a visual device that illustrates spatial relationships, it’s natural to assume that the position of each element (e.g., each bar) reflects an actual, physical location. When we violate this assumption, we undermine the visual integrity of the map. This can handicap our analysis. This is particularly true given that 44% (257/578) of the bars in Snow’s map fall into this second, geographically uninformative category.
To address these problems, I “unstack” Dodson and Tobler’s data. I do so
in two ways. In the first, I give all all cases in a stack (i.e., at the
same “address”) the same x-y coordinate. These data are available in
fatalities.unstacked
. In the second, I make the address rather than
the the case the unit of observation: each address is a single
observation with a single x-y coordinate, and the number of cases
observed at that location is an attribute of that address. These data
are available in fatalities.address
.
To illustrate the differences between these two data sets, consider how they handle the largest outlier on Snow’s map: the eighteen cases at 38 Broad Street.
With fatalities
, all members of the stack have different coordinates:
## The 18 cases at 38 Broad Street ##
broad38 <- c(239, 12, 310, 398, 562, 397, 421, 190, 290, 61, 174, 547, 523,
521, 138, 59, 340, 508)
fatalities[fatalities$case %in% broad38, ]
> case x y lon lat
> 12 12 12.34107 11.48214 -0.1368065 51.51321
> 59 59 12.58271 11.01057 -0.1366110 51.51298
> 61 61 12.47289 11.21463 -0.1367018 51.51309
> 138 138 12.56326 11.04593 -0.1366320 51.51301
> 174 174 12.48731 11.17735 -0.1366808 51.51307
> 190 190 12.44094 11.28124 -0.1367157 51.51312
> 239 239 12.31552 11.51159 -0.1368204 51.51324
> 290 290 12.45943 11.24890 -0.1367157 51.51310
> 310 310 12.35546 11.44285 -0.1367855 51.51319
> 340 340 12.59532 10.98533 -0.1365971 51.51298
> 397 397 12.40901 11.34986 -0.1365063 51.51313
> 398 398 12.36903 11.41560 -0.1367855 51.51319
> 421 421 12.42551 11.31754 -0.1367367 51.51315
> 508 508 12.61480 10.95197 -0.1365761 51.51296
> 521 521 12.54972 11.07519 -0.1366320 51.51302
> 523 523 12.53218 11.10452 -0.1366459 51.51304
> 547 547 12.51176 11.14190 -0.1366669 51.51305
> 562 562 12.39045 11.37820 -0.1367716 51.51317
With fatalities.unstacked
, all members of the stack have the same
coordinate:
fatalities.unstacked[fatalities.unstacked$case %in% broad38, ]
> case x y lon lat
> 12 12 12.31552 11.51159 -0.1368204 51.51324
> 59 59 12.31552 11.51159 -0.1368204 51.51324
> 61 61 12.31552 11.51159 -0.1368204 51.51324
> 138 138 12.31552 11.51159 -0.1368204 51.51324
> 174 174 12.31552 11.51159 -0.1368204 51.51324
> 190 190 12.31552 11.51159 -0.1368204 51.51324
> 239 239 12.31552 11.51159 -0.1368204 51.51324
> 290 290 12.31552 11.51159 -0.1368204 51.51324
> 310 310 12.31552 11.51159 -0.1368204 51.51324
> 340 340 12.31552 11.51159 -0.1368204 51.51324
> 397 397 12.31552 11.51159 -0.1368204 51.51324
> 398 398 12.31552 11.51159 -0.1368204 51.51324
> 421 421 12.31552 11.51159 -0.1368204 51.51324
> 508 508 12.31552 11.51159 -0.1368204 51.51324
> 521 521 12.31552 11.51159 -0.1368204 51.51324
> 523 523 12.31552 11.51159 -0.1368204 51.51324
> 547 547 12.31552 11.51159 -0.1368204 51.51324
> 562 562 12.31552 11.51159 -0.1368204 51.51324
With fatalities.address
, the 18 cases are represented by a single
observation, case 239, which serves as the “address”:
fatalities.address[136:140, ]
> anchor x y case.count lon lat
> 136 237 15.775540 13.98787 2 -0.1340355 51.51439
> 137 238 12.900190 10.33882 1 -0.1363598 51.51266
> 138 239 12.315520 11.51159 18 -0.1368204 51.51324
> 139 240 9.794394 11.77236 1 -0.1388027 51.51339
> 140 242 12.677590 12.05460 1 -0.1365133 51.51351
To illustrate the virtues of “unstacked” data, consider the following.
The graphs below plot the bivariate kernel density contours, of varying bandwidths, on the “stacked” and “unstacked” data. The contours help illustrate the spatial distribution or topography of fatalities, and provide an estimate of the epicenter of the outbreak.
With the “stacked” data, fatalities
, the contours are looser
(reflecting lower proximity) and the epicenter is further south than we
might expect given that the Broad Street pump (blue triangle)3 is the
accepted source of the outbreak. The problem is that the “vertical”
stack of 18 cases (west of the pump at 38 Broad Street) and the
“horizontal” stack of 5 cases (south of the pump at 10 Cambridge Street)
pull the fit downward in a southerly direction.
With fatalities.unstacked
, the contours are “tighter” (reflecting
greater proximity) and the epicenter is located further north, nearer to
the pump and to Broad Street:
The main roadblock to “unstacking” is that there is no notion of an “address” in the data: bars are merely points and the streets are merely line segments.4 Nothing links a point to a segment. And nothing connects one bar in a stack to another bar in the same stack. All elements exist independently of one another. The only reason why the map “works” is that the fatalities and roads data have proximate x-y coordinates.
To “unstack” the data, we need to match each bar to a specific road (segment) and to a specific stack. To accomplish these tasks, I use two types of classification. For those interested, the details are found in “computing street addresses”, which is available online in this package’s GitHub repository.
Footnotes
-
The map was originally published in Snow’s 1855 book, “On The Mode Of Communication Of Cholera”, and was reprinted as John Snow et. al., 1936. Snow on Cholera: Being a Reprint of Two Papers. New York: The Common Wealth Fund. You can also find the map online (a high resolution version is available on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20230124072836/https://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/highressnowmap.html (the original site, which no longer seems available, was www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow/highressnowmap.html) and in many books, including Edward Tufte’s 1997 “Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative”. ↩
-
The original URL, www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/pubs/snow/snow.html, no longer works. ↩
-
The blue triangle is the “correct” location of the pump as included in the amended, second version of the map that appears in the Vestry report. The empty green triangle is the pump’s “wrong” location from the original map. ↩
-
In Friendly’s ‘HistData’ package, these data are called
Snow.deaths
andSnow.streets
. ↩