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Record W4417326844 · doi:10.5194/ica-abs-10-155-2025

Carto-philatelic time series and other oddities

2025· article· en· W4417326844 on OpenAlex
M.J. Kraak

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueAbstracts of the ICA · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPhysics and Astronomy
TopicHistorical Astronomy and Related Studies
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsContext (archaeology)GeopoliticsFLAGS registerTimelinePoliticsIdentity (music)Boundary (topology)RevenueFocus (optics)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This contribution will focus on geographical / geopolitical changes over time as depicted in maps on stamps. A traditional definition of a stamp would probably be ‘usually a rectangular piece of paper of varying colour and denomination, affixed to a letter etc. to cover the cost of postage’. Today, however, the word rectangular could easily be replaced by triangular, round or even map shaped. The paper could be cloth or even chocolate. Stamps even exist as crypto or non-fungible tokens, in other words a stamp with a digital twin. All these changes over time are new revenue models for postal authorities, as very few people use stamps to pay for postage. Stamps, in whatever form, offer a small window into a nation's society, nature and culture. They aim to give a country a profile by depicting its people, identity and territory. People and identity are often linked to heritage. This leads to themes of monarchs and political leaders, flags and heraldry, traditional costumes, folklore, etc. However, when looking at the timeline of a country's stamp issues, the timeframe provides a context for the choices made regarding the themes. In the case of territory, the nation or area is represented and identified by locational and boundary features. These could be typical landscape features and maps. The first stamp issues of a 'new' nation often include a map claiming the territory and a flag to emphasise identity. Figure 1a shows an example from the Faroe Islands. In such situations, stamps can become geopolitical tools. This can be harmless, as in Figure 1a, where the outline of a country is depicted. However, sometimes nations use the map on the stamp to claim part of the territory of neighbouring countries. It is interesting for cartographers to look at the design of these carto-philatelic items. The maps depicted are not always designed with the medium, the small piece of paper, in mind. The maps could be reduced details of existing maps or they could be designed specifically for the stamp. In many cases, however, the rules of cartographic design are not necessarily followed. Figure 1b shows the outline of France on a stamp from Equatorial Guinea. In cases such as this, external organisations create stamp series for a postal authority on subjects that do not offer a window into a nation's society but have commercial objectives. There are also more sophisticated stamp designs (Figure 1c). Liechtenstein's First Day Cover shows a map of land use, which on the stamp is transformed into a schematic diagram symbolising land use. The cancellation stamp is also a map. Time series of map stamps exist in many forms. The most common is a series of historic maps of a region, showing the evolving knowledge of the shape of the area as new surveying techniques became available. A series of four topographic map details was issued to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the Ordnance Survey (Figure 1d). Canada issued a series of four stamps showing the expansion of the country over time (Figure 1e). Comparing different map stamp issues of an area over time can show how the perspectives of the authorities have changed, introducing geopolitics in the time series. Several examples are shown in the figure. Figure 1f shows Panama, first as part of Colombia, as an independent nation, with a gap because of the Panama Canal Zone and the situation when the Canal Zone was returned to Panama. Pakistan, shortly after independence, showed the territory of Kashmir and Jammu as disputed, but more recently is seen as an integral part of the country (Figure 1g). Figure 9 shows Suriname. Its extent in the south-east and south-west overlaps with the claims of French Guiana and Guyana respectively. However, at the 15th year of their independence, the Surinam map inadvertently omits these claims, which are reinstated in later postage stamp editions. Sometimes the time series of stamps are issued to cover up mistakes. The stamps of Guernsey (Figure 1h) are such an example, which issued a map with an incorrect latitude, placing the island near Madrid. Other anomalies will be discussed in this paper with a focus on the influence of map design.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.664
Threshold uncertainty score0.196

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.003
GPT teacher head0.193
Teacher spread0.190 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it