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Re: Map to Atlantia




Poster: David KUIJT <kuijt@umiacs.umd.edu>



Alfredo writes:
 
> > > >     I have had a wonderful idea, but I need a hand.  I am wondering
> > > > if anyone has ever developed a map of the Kindom of Atlantia.  It will
> > > > include all Baronies, Shires, Colleges, Households, etc.
> > 
> > *Households*? Those are going to be awfully hard to put in just one place.
> 
> You find the head of the household, then ask her (or him), "If
> you had to pick just one place to say where your household is,
> where would it be?"  If she refused to answer, just list that
> household on the margin of the map.  Is that awfully hard?


Baronies, Shires, Colleges all have physical extent (good for mapping) and
official status (good for determining whether they really exist or not).

Households may have some sense of center, or not.  But adding them to the
map may add confusion and make a poor map -- the Kingdom is divided up
into Baronies/Shires/etc., and the mapping is very simple -- the only
time when more than one group is allocated a given space is when the space
is simultaneously in a canton and the barony of that canton.  With
households there is no such division of space -- you might have forty
households that all are active in a given area.  This is very hard to
describe pictorially.

And Households have no simple metric to determine if they exist or not.
They depend upon the activity-level of people.  Shall we include the
household of hoary Earl Knarlic Wulfharson?  He was King of Atlantia some
long time ago, but is not active now, although he still lives in this
area.  But his descendents still exist and are active, some of them, and
some of them have started households of their own.  Some households are
very temporary, living a year or two at most.  Some are longer lived.
Some are small.  Some are large.  Some have physical locality, some do
not.  I have currently (for another week or so) a squire in the Outlands,
and she (being a Laurel) has taken an apprentice out there.  How do you
describe that on a flat map?  I haven't met her apprentice yet.  Does that
mean that Wren (the apprentice) is not in my household, or that she is?
We've talked in writing and email, does that change things?  This is a
matter of complexity, and the definitions of where a household begins and
ends are not obvious.

For example, Rebeccah de Veryan just married Johann Coldiron somewhere in
NoVa.  Rebeccah is/was a squire of Graf Klaus von Trollenberg, and is/was
in Klaus's household.  Johann was a squire of Count Thorbrandr until
knighted last Pennsic.  How do you describe the married pair of them?  Do
they have their own household?  Yes, in theory, but I'm not sure if they
have anyone in it yet but themselves (I haven't heard).  They are also
closely associated with Thorbrandr, although whether they and Thorbrandr
consider themselves to be still in Thorbrandr's household would depend
upon details of their relationship that I am not privy to.  Beccah is
still in Klaus's household, although that is complicated by the fact that
Klaus is inactive.  All of Klaus's household is inside Clan Oldcastle,
though, so even though Klaus's activity is limited to Sunday Mudhockey
games, Beccah still has a connection through him to others.  What that
connection _means_ is always defined by the people involved, not by some
standard definition.

The Domesday Book of Atlantia would be an IMMENSE undertaking if you tried
to find out all the household links and track activity.  I have worked on
such a project in the past -- figuring out the household links for a
single household in Atlantia (Clan Oldcastle --  Gyrth's Household, and
the households of everyone descending from that, and the households of
everyone descending from the descendants, and so on).  It was a very large
undertaking, and most people didn't respond.  Expand the set of people
being queried from 150 (all of whom I had addresses for) to 1500+ or more
(even if we only talk about members) and you will see the enormity of the
problem.

So, Alfredo, when you ask about putting households on the map, "Is that
awfully hard?" I am led to respond 

Yes, it is.

Some data is naturally spatially-organized, and thus is easily depicted in
maps.  Some data is not.  Households are related to friendship cliques,
which can be effectively graphed (using people as vertices and friendship
connections as arcs, weighted by the strength of the connection), but
these graphs are non-planar and do not relate to physical geography in any
natural way. 



Dafydd ap Gwystl

mundanely David Kuijt, PhD student in spatial database indexing.

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