God's Map

Maps may be flawed, but we'd be lost without them.

Most people who went to Hay-on-Wye to the 2015 HowTheLightGetsIn festival will have used a road map to get there. It’s an accurate and useful tool for navigation, but it’s full of mis-representations. The map is accurately ‘to scale’ – so it’s possible, for example, to estimate the distance to Hereford. But there are anomalies – the roads on the map are far too wide, and the representative symbols are of course absent on the ground. This commonplace map is helpful and accurate in many useful ways, but we imposed onto the map our vision of the structure of the landscape and its contents that are simply not there, which is not to say that they are not useful.

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