I’m watching the first of the “Beauty of Maps” series, the one on the Mappa Mundi. It shows the map as being a complex meeting of religious text and an expression of understanding of the world. The richness of this function is in stark contrast to our strict measurement and coercing of the world into the precise coordinate spaces of a web page. The authors could stick all sorts of junk everywhere. Or to quote, “visual encyclopedias of a complex world”.
So two things have been rattling around in my head recently:
- it would be interesting to take the distorted historical understanding of the world and somehow transpose this into a proper GIS. So you are in the middle, with a vague understanding of unknown blobs at the edge. The map would use rubber-sheet topology to somehow match your knowledge and ignorance. Unexplored areas are just fuzzy bits at the edge. Why should you have your map cluttered up with lots of areas you don’t care about, and will never visit? Places you visit could be cheerfully illustrated in 3d. Scary places you don’t visit would once again be full of sea monsters. This could be applied to actual historical maps – how would our current geographical information look when transposed into these distorted coordinate systems?
- the last post (recently visited constructions) was a plaintive attempt to illustrate something: a building, although defining a place, is actually composed of many different places. So St Non’s Chapel literally contains within its walls parts of other places, other buildings which would have been scattered around the area over more than a thousand years. I have no idea how that information can be sourced and compiled in a useful way. Or how that would then be expressed and communicated in a meaningful way. But the geographical area would be fairly small – the stones wouldn’t have moved very far. Unlike the stones of Stonehenge, some of which came from the Preseli Mountains in Wales. That would be another map again…