Kate Elliott​

“[W]hen we think about maps, we think about external maps.  We think about something we can look at. And it is important in a number of ways to place yourself in space. And I mean that either in the three dimensional space or the two dimensional space of a map….But the other thing that I have really come to understand over the years is that when people write…a lot of times when they think about map making, they’re also not thinking about the internal map that they’re bringing to what they’re writing….

So an external map might be a topographical map, where we can see where the mountains and the rivers are, and we can place the cities here and we can gauge how long it will take us to travel from this city to that battlefield or that village…..now these things begin to develop together. But one of the other things that happens is people don’t think about the internal map they’re bringing. And the internal map they bring to their creation, to world creation, and I include myself, is all the assumptions, the expectations, the stereotypes, the things they don’t know about.”