Jerusalem holds, the edges fray

Status: Anticipated · untested

Status is derived only from the shepherd-authored triage/prediction data above -- community submissions and claims are a separate overlay and can never change it (see the participation panel below).

This is a proposed connection between two domains, generated by a language model. It is not an article and not evidence: it sits below the evidence/publication boundary. A quantitative prediction and a named kill-dataset are attached (when registered) so the claim stays falsifiable rather than merely evocative.

Claim (verbatim)

Copyists of world maps worked outward from the ideologically loaded centre, and their attention decayed with radius. The surprising connection is that copying fidelity on mappae mundi is therefore a radial function: error and omission density rises with distance from the map's devotional centre, so each copy is a measurable attention map of its scriptorium. The mechanism is checking effort — the centre carries the theological payload and gets proofread, the rim is filler and does not. If this holds, the wild divergence of peripheral regions between related maps, long attributed to independent sources, becomes largely a predictable artifact of centre-out copying discipline.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Statistical test: across related map pairs in Virtual Mappa, the per-name omission-plus-corruption rate in the outer radial third of the map will exceed that in the inner third by a factor of at least 2, with a monotone increase across the three radial bands confirmed by a trend test at p<0.05. Primary clause: the twofold outer-to-inner ratio; the trend test is secondary.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Virtual Mappa, using its georeferenced name annotations to compute radial error gradients.

Nobody has run this test. The kill-data is named above. If you can run it — or you know the paper that already settles it — claim the kill or submit the prior. Kills and priors are credited here, by name, as they come in.

In the atlas

This conjecture is bridged, as an L1 lead, onto these Inferpedia subject pages.

Provenance

Run: Fresh agent generation · model: claude-fable-5

Composed blind by claude-fable-5 with zero tool use of any kind; the packet was generated entirely from the model's own knowledge and emitted as a single text message.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

Centre-privileging composition of mappae mundi (devotional centre, enlarged home regions, schematic periphery) is a commonplace of the history of cartography, but a measured radial gradient of copying fidelity between related maps — error density as a function of distance from the devotional centre — has not been computed or proposed as an explanation for peripheral divergence.

The History of Cartography, vol. 3 pt. 1, ch. 2, 'The Role of Maps in Later Medieval Society'

Predictions

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