The map’s blank space may contain lives its maker never learned to name.

Emptiness on a map is a statement about the mapmaker rather than about the ground. Blank areas were unsurveyed, judged unimportant, or lived in by people whose settlements did not count as places to whoever was drawing. Anyone reading it afterwards inherits that omission as though it were terrain. What is missing from a record is usually missing for a reason, and the reason is rarely written on the record.

When you look at any summary, spreadsheet or report, ask what it was not built to see. Finding one thing the format cannot hold tells you more than another pass over what it does.