Measure by Measure: Reflections on Building a Quiz Map for Critical Caribbean Digital Pedagogy

This article reflects on the web development of a digital quiz map designed to help students critically engage with the representation of the Caribbean in digital space. Emerging from workshops organized by Visiones del Caribe—a digital humanities initiative using digitized maps and archives to teach Caribbean history, culture, and cartography—this tool responds to students’ inquiries about the region’s spatial boundaries. The quiz invites students to select on a map those countries and territories they consider part of the Caribbean, prompting reflection on the diversity of perspectives shaping Caribbean identity. Drawing from the discourse of critical cartography and digital pedagogy, we examine how mapping is not neutral, but a political and ethical problem shaped by colonial legacies, languages, and ideologies. Applying Antonio Gaztambide-Géigel’s framework defining the Caribbean across four categories: 1) ethnohistorical, 2) geopolitical, 3) Greater colonial, 4) plantation-cultural, the beta version of our quiz map used polygons to code a program that defined certain vectors as Caribbean. Producing this tool led to a reflection on the ethics of measurement. We consider how a customizable choropleth political base map differs from a standardized political map by being more capacious in its scope of what counts as Caribbean, reigniting debates about overlapping borders (such as Hispaniola or the renamed Gulf of America) and competing linguistic frameworks (such as Taíno). Our process revealed how digital tools can both reinforce and challenge dominant narratives. We conclude counter-mapping practices offer a powerful way to reimagine the Caribbean as a plural, evolving space, deepening pedagogical engagement while foregrounding the implications of digital representation.