地図が省いているものについての講義

論拠、態度、含意

1. c) Maps reflect choices about what is worth recording地図は世界に開かれた窓ではなく、何が記憶されるに値するかについての決定だと述べています。
2. b) They were the rocks that had wrecked ships船を沈めた岩を描いていたので、その海図は不運を記録していると述べています。
3. c) They did not interest the people paying for the surveyそれらは地元ではよく知られていましたが、彼のパトロンには収入をもたらさなかったので、紙の上では存在しないことになりました。
4. a) A silence can never be put right because the information was never gathered単純化は、より大きな紙を使えば元に戻せますが、沈黙は戻せません。誰もその詳細を集めていなかったからです。
5. b) He accepts it only in part彼は「up to a point」までは受け入れると述べ、その後さらに区別を加えています。
6. c) To show that what a map includes can have real effects on people who were not consultedその小道は、どこかよそで下された選択によって近道になり、住民は意見を聞かれませんでした。
7. a) He thinks it is too strong, because most selection is not intended to deceive嘘には欺く意図が必要で、ほとんどの取捨選択は習慣や便宜から来るので、彼はその言葉に異を唱えています。
8. d) Ask who made it, for whom, and what is missing誰がその地図を作ったか、誰のために作ったか、そして欠けているものを含めていたら何を失っただろうかを問うよう勧めています。

重要な細部

1. three / 3講師は、砂州で3回の夏を過ごしたと述べています。
2. useless昔からの冗談は、そのような地図は役に立たないだろう、というものです。
3. shortcut / short cut講師は、それが後回しの存在から近道へと格上げされたと述べています。
4. bemused彼らは突然の交通量に戸惑っていたと述べています。
5. interest彼は、地図とは利害関係のある証人による優れた証拠だと言って締めくくっています。

Professor Lindqvist: Good morning. Last week I suggested that every map is an argument, and several of you looked at me as though I had said something faintly indecent. So let me defend the claim. A map is not a window onto the world; it is a decision about what deserves to be remembered. Consider the humble coastal chart of the eighteenth century. Its makers did not draw rocks because rocks exist. They drew the rocks that had sunk ships, which is to say they drew a history of misfortune and called it geography.

Professor Lindqvist: Now, the interesting part is what these charts leave blank. A white space on a map is rarely an absence of knowledge. More often it is an absence of interest. The surveyor of a certain northern estuary, whom I shall call Mr Pellham, spent three summers measuring its sandbanks, and then, quite deliberately, drew the inland marshes as a pale, featureless wash. The marshes were well known to every local fisherman. They simply earned no money for his patrons, and so, on paper, they were not there.

Professor Lindqvist: You might object that this is merely a matter of scale. A map as large as the territory would be useless, as the old joke goes, and omission is the price of usefulness. I accept that, up to a point. But there is a difference between a simplification and a silence, and critical cartography begins with learning to tell them apart. A simplification can be reversed: give me a larger sheet and I will add the detail. A silence cannot, because nobody ever collected the detail in the first place.

Professor Lindqvist: Let me offer a modern parallel, since I'm told that anything older than a decade strikes you as antique. Navigation applications now choose routes for millions of drivers, and they quietly favour wide, fast roads. Residents of a narrow lane in a hill town I visited were bemused to find their street suddenly crowded with lorries. Nothing had changed on the ground. The lane had merely been promoted, by an algorithm, from an afterthought to a shortcut, and nobody had asked those who lived there whether they wished to be a shortcut.

Student: Professor, doesn't that make every map a kind of lie? If it's all selection, how can we trust any of them?

Professor Lindqvist: A fair question, though I would resist the word lie. A lie requires an intention to deceive, whereas most selection is made out of habit, convenience, or the wishes of whoever is paying. The remedy is not distrust but literacy. Ask who made the map, for whom, and what they would have lost by including the thing that is missing. Do that, and a map stops being a verdict and becomes what it always was: a very good piece of evidence, from a witness with an interest. And be wary of any map that looks perfectly confident.