Idle Sails · research · the flow matrix

The chart’s silences

The archive is not the past. Every dataset behind this chart began as someone’s decision to count — a toll register, a customs house, a company ledger — and the seas those institutions did not watch left no numbers behind. This page records the flows we know existed and cannot (or choose not to) quantify: each with the reason for its silence, and what the chart does about it.

Every trade in the simulation carries an evidence class — counted (a surviving series), proxied (inferred from adjacent records), reconstructed (scholarship’s estimate), or asserted (our own stated guess, wide bounds, reasoning on record). The rule beneath them all: a known trade is never silently zero — because in a living chart, zero is not neutrality; it is a claim, repeated every simulated day, that the ships weren’t there.

Idle Sails · PLAN-3 (flows, evidence, and silences) · data: research/flows/silences.json · after M.-R. Trouillot, Silencing the Past — silences enter at the making of sources, of archives, of narratives, and of history. ° An unsailable port on the companion prominence page marks the same thing at sea.