The void
is also data.
"How do we study places whose physical or nominal existence has been deliberately altered or destroyed?"
Erasure is the fourth and final system in the SAWIP programme. It is currently at the conceptual design stage and has not yet entered active development.
The Concept
Erasure fills the gap no other SAWIP system addresses: the systematic treatment of places that have been physically or nominally destroyed, altered, or suppressed. The central insight is that the void is not missing data — it is meaningful data.
Combines archival, cartographic, satellite, and oral layers to triangulate a destroyed place's former extent.
Establishes geometries with explicit confidence intervals rather than false precision.
Traces the full life-cycle of erasure — before, during, and after destruction — as a spatial time series.
Topodex resolves ambiguity for places that still exist. MORPHEME compares urban form across surviving cities. CDISaW indexes events within places. None treat erasure itself as a spatial phenomenon — where the object of study is a place deliberately altered or destroyed.
Erasure framework is at the design stage. Probabilistic reconstruction methodology in early development.