Protocol MAP-4

Definition and Scope

Protocol MAP-4 is the fourth-stage tier of the Material Authentication Protocol (MAP), designated Attribution Contest. It governs the formal procedure by which a party may dispute an attribution already granted under MAP-3, and by which the Authentication Desk of the Map Room's central rotunda must adjudicate that dispute. MAP-4 is distinct from MAP-2 in that a Provenance Challenge attacks the chain of custody before a material has been dated, whereas MAP-4 accepts the dating and attacks the name attached to it. It is distinct from MAP-5 in that MAP-4 proceeds entirely on paper; no disputed material is unsealed during a Contest. This last point is the source of most of the difficulty discussed below.

The Protocol was amended in the winter of the year numbered Floor 4471, following the Haldane Recension, and has not been substantially revised since. Its standing epigraph, affixed to the inner cover of every working copy, reads: "A name is a claim about the past that no present instrument can settle." The line is attributed to Librarian Ossian Vey, though the Doctrine of Singular Agency disputes the ascription and assigns it to an anonymous amanuensis of the Lower Scriptorium.

Procedure

A Contest may be opened by any party of record — the holder of the material, a rival attributor, or an office of the survey — within ninety days of the granting of a MAP-3 certificate. The contestant submits a Statement of Contrary Claim, a document of no fixed length but strict form, in which the proposed alternative attribution is named and its grounds catalogued. Grounds acceptable under MAP-4 are limited to three: an inconsistency in the Sigil Authentication record, a demonstrable error in the cartographer's Ballast Index cross-references, or the emergence of a second material bearing the same sigil. Complaints of style, mood, or "feel" are entered on a separate schedule and do not open a Contest; see below.

The Authentication Desk then fixes a hearing, not fewer than twelve days nor more than forty from the filing. Both attributions are carried in parallel on the register until the Contest is decided. Under MAP-4 clause 9, a material under Contest may be consulted but not copied, and no copy may be made of it by any means, including memory, without the attendant of the desk present to hear the retelling.

The Haldane Recension

The Haldane Recension arose from the case of the Delta Sequence Map, whose attribution to a single cartographer was contested in the year numbered Floor 4471 by a survey party that had found what it took to be a second hand in the western margin. The Desk, applying the Protocol as it then stood, permitted the material to be unrolled for comparison in the hearing chamber. The unrolling took four hours. In the fifth, the disputed margin was found to match nothing in the room, the survey party withdrew its claim, and the material was returned to seal with a smudge on the marginal note that has not been explained.

The Librarians' response was the Recension: the removal of any inspection of the material from MAP-4 proceedings whatsoever. The reasoning is recorded in the Recension's preamble:

"The hand that checks is the hand that alters. We cannot weigh a name against a thing that is changed by the weighing. Let the Contest be decided on the papers alone, and let the papers be copies."

— Haldane Recension, preamble to Annex 2

The Recension's opponents, chiefly the Office of Marginal Hands, argued that deciding a Contest of attribution on copies of an original is to adjudicate a thing's name by its shadow. Their objection was entered, numbered, and shelved, and the Recension stands.

Schedule of Unnamed Grounds

Although style may not open a Contest, the Desk has since the Recension maintained the Schedule of Unnamed Grounds: an informal register of contests in which the only ground furnished was a difference of hand that no instrument could confirm. The Schedule is closed to the public and was for many years believed lost. Its survival was confirmed only when the desk clerk Pell, Second Amanuensis produced it during the dispute over the Map of Last Tuesday, in which a claimant insisted that the map's Tuesday was not the same Tuesday as the calendar's. The Desk upheld the existing attribution and entered the claim on the Schedule under the heading "calendrical."

The clerk's marginal note, still legible, records: "The claimant's Tuesday is Tuesday. The map's is not. Neither can be shown."

Dispute Between Concordances

MAP-4 is the subject of one of the more persistent contradictions in the archive. The Sixth Concordance, Article 14, holds that a Contest decided under MAP-4 is final and may not be reopened; the Ninth Concordance, Annex 7, holds that an attribution carried in parallel during a Contest is provisional only, and that Provisional Attribution lapses after five years if not confirmed. Since a Contest under MAP-4 routinely runs longer than five years — the record, held by a dispute over the Aggregate Echo Map, is nineteen — the two Concordances cannot both be applied to the same material. The Bureau of Concordance Reconciliation has declined to resolve the conflict on the ground that doing so would require a Contest, which is itself governed by the conflicting Articles. The matter is now referred to by the phrase "the standing difficulty" wherever it arises in the Protocol, and the Desk proceeds as though the Sixth governed and the Ninth did not.

Recording and Precedents

Decisions are recorded in the Register of Contested Attributions, kept in a single volume in the Map Room and amended by pasted slip rather than by recopying, "so that what was believed is not lost when what is believed changes." The Register's slip for the Delta Sequence Map is three layers deep. Cases are indexed by MAP-4 reference and cited by letter; the earliest surviving are MAP-4.03-A through D, concerning a plan of an unnumbered stair, all four of which were resolved in favour of the same attribution for four different reasons. That outcome is itself cited, in MAP-6, as proof that a procedure can be sound and unhelpful at once.

Materials whose Contest lapses under the Ninth Concordance are not destroyed. They are deposited in the Room of Required Presence pending confirmation, where they remain available to the Desk and unavailable to anyone else. Visitors to that Room are asked not to bring paper of their own; the reason is not recorded.

See also

• Material Authentication Protocol (MAP)
• Material Authentication Protocol
• MAP-2
• MAP-3
• MAP-5
• MAP-6
• Sigil Authentication
• Provisional Attribution
• Ballast Index
• Register of Contested Attributions