内容摘要：“I wasn’t a subject for this paper, but I’ve seen olo since, and it’s very striking. You know you’re looking at something very blue-green,” Doyle said.

“I wasn’t a subject for this paper, but I’ve seen olo since, and it’s very striking. You know you’re looking at something very blue-green,” Doyle said.

German activist Arno Peters declared his Peters Projection as the “only” precise map, and the true alternative to the Mercator model.Peters, whose parents had been imprisoned by Nazis and who focused on social inequalities as a journalist and academic criticised the Mercator projection as “Euro-centred”.

The fervour with which he and his supporters promoted the projection as a scientific feat and a social justice breakthrough bordered on what some called propaganda. It caused concerned groups like the United States National Council of Churches to take notice and immediately adopt the map.Critics, though, were quick to call out Peters on two things. The map, observers pointed out, was only distorted differently: Where the Mercator projection makes areas near the poles appear much larger, the Peters projection relatively represents accurate sizes throughout, but slightly stretches areas near the equator vertically, and areas near the poles horizontally.“There was also the fact that this map had already been presented by another cartographer decades ago,” Braun said, explaining the second problem.

Scottish scientist James Gall indeed first published an identical projection in a science journal in 1855, but it went unnoticed. There is no proof, some researchers say, that Peters outrightly plagiarised Gall, but critics say his failure to credit the earlier researcher is still problematic.In 2016, the debate resurfaced with renewed vigour after public schools in the US city of Boston switched to what many now refer to as the “Gall-Peters” projection. Officials said the move was part of a three-year effort to “decolonise the curriculum”. Teachers said they were amazed to see students questioning their view of the world after the switch.

However, many experts and map enthusiasts were annoyed by the fact that Boston chose Peters, and as such, gave the projection renewed relevance.

Al Jazeera reached out to the Boston Public Schools (BPS) for comment.They plan to set up “emergency” memory clinics in places where cultural heritage is in danger of being eroded by natural disasters, such as in southern Brazil, which was last year hit by floods. There are also hopes to make their finished tool freely available to nursing homes.

But Garcia wonders what place the project could have in a future where there is an “over-registration” of everything that happens. “I have 10 images of my father when he was a kid,” he says. “I have over 200 when I was a kid. But my friend, of her daughter, [has] 25,000, and she’s five years old!”“I think the problem of memory image will be another one, which will be that we are … [overwhelmed] and we cannot find the right image to tell us the story,” he muses.

Yet in the present moment, Vallejo believes the project has a role to play in helping younger generations understand past injustices. Forgetting serves no purpose for activists like himself, he believes, while memory is like “a weapon for the future”.Instead of trying to numb the past, “I think it is more therapeutic – both collectively and individually – to remember rather than to forget.”