How does the concept of “space” lead to a deeper understanding of how historical developments unfold? Click on the chapters to follow through with this chapter on spatial analysis.
April 29, 2011: Spatial Analysis
Host: Zephyr Frank
This was a very nice lecture. I enjoyed learning about the visualization of the evolution of diseases that appeared centuries ago in Rio de Janeiro. From a historical and epidemiological perspective, it was quite impressive to see the evolution of yellow fever in Rio that resulted in a huge death toll. From this analysis one can get information that ranges in scale from a given individual to an entire population. This type of spatial analysis helps us to predict what would be the critical population density to prevent an epidemic of this magnitude. This approach not only has historical value, but also allows us to speculate what would happen today if an epidemic starts spreading in a big city. One of the biggest challenges for this work is to get reliable raw data to do the simulation. Another thing that I enjoyed from the lecture was the spatial visualization of the characters in Bras Cubas. This type of analysis gives us a better idea about the motility of people during the novel’s period.