The following content has been provided by the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Thank you very much for the introduction.

Thank you very much for inviting me here.

Thank you for all the practical help, especially in this tricky travel situation we have this weekend,

and especially because I'm going somewhere else afterwards, so there were some practical issues to sort out,

but I'm here now, and I'm really looking forward to get your feedback on this.

It is a study of the relationship between texts and maps.

In a way it is a talk about how you can make maps out of texts,

but it's also a speech about how difficult it is.

So in a way the aim of the research is not to make maps,

the aim of the research is to understand the difficulties in making maps.

So more than a study of going from A to B, it's a study of,

or more than a study of how to get from A to B,

it's a study of all the problems you face along the way from A to B,

problems that people often don't think very much about.

Okay, let's dive into it.

I will first start with some findings from my PhD project.

It's about modelling of geographical descriptions,

and the creation of maps based on those, through conceptual modelling.

Then I will present an attempt I did to apply a similar thinking on the fictional text

from around the same time as my geographical descriptions, that is the 18th century.

Then I will see how this relates to the distinction between poetry and painting.

Then I will jump from the 18th century up to a very recent research

into media modality and semiotics, Swedish professor in Växjö, Lars Ellström,

Linnaeus University, and then I will see how this might work on modern fiction

in Ishiguro's book, The Unconsoled.

So I will dive into Scandinavia in the 1740s.

This was a time where the Great Nordic War was ended some 20 years before.

In the peace treaty between Sweden and Denmark, it was agreed that

one of the things that might lead to peace was to establish a fixed border

between Denmark and Sweden.

Of course, there was no border between Denmark and Sweden in the south anymore,

but Norway as a part of Denmark and Finland as a part of Sweden,

of course there was a long border there.

So the final treaty was signed in 1751 and the border is still unchanged from that.

In general, if you simplify more than a little bit, you can say that

the transfer into early modern and modern state borders is based on taking

the property controlled by relationships between the sovereign and the inhabitants

in the area.

So all the farms connected to a king became the state.

Very, very simplified.

This is problematic in northern Scandinavia because the border area was inhabited

by semi-nomadic Sami reindeer herders, first peoples.

So there were no people living fixed that you could, and obviously many of these

people were moving back and forth between what would become Denmark-Norway

and what would become Sweden-Finland.

It was also the case that they made the border based on two principles,

one of possession, who traditionally owned the area, and one of topography,

the highest mountain ridge.

And they saw the common people as a source of information in both these areas.