About Marchland: the method, the sources and how corrections work

What the name means

A marchland is a borderland. The word is English, attested from the middle of the sixteenth century, and it names the territory along a frontier rather than the line itself — which is the distinction this site keeps returning to. A border is drawn; the ground it crosses is not. Almost every difficulty in watching a frontier comes from the gap between those two things.

The site is published at talos-border.eu. A European research project on land border surveillance once used the same domain; it closed in 2012 and is recorded here as a subject like any other, in the dossiers — with its grant record, its budget, its consortium and what became of it, written in the third person and sourced line by line. Every organisation named anywhere on this site is named that way.

The method, page by page

Four rules govern everything published here, and they are worth stating plainly because they determine what the site can and cannot tell you.

1. Public documents only. Grant records, official journals, published papers, regulators' decisions, and organisations' own published material — the last named as such, because an organisation describing its own work is not an independent source.
2. Method with every figure. A number without a method is decoration. Where a figure is geometric it says so; where it comes from a trial the trial is named; where it comes from a specification it is marked as a specification rather than a measurement.
3. Disagreement shown, not resolved. When two credible sources differ, both appear. Choosing between them would be an editorial judgement dressed as a fact.
4. Silence recorded. Where the public record simply stops — which happens most often at the point a reader most wants it to continue — the stopping is stated.

What this site does not do

It does not recommend systems, suppliers or policies, and it does not argue for or against border surveillance. Both would require weighing interests, which is a different activity from describing mechanisms, and a site that did both would be trusted for neither. Procurement, tenders and supplier comparison are outside its scope for the same reason.

It also does not publish anything about identifiable individuals. Photographs used here show terrain and equipment; where a recovered image contained recognisable faces it was either cropped past them or not used.

Citing and reusing this site

Cite the page rather than the site: each one carries its own claim and its own sources, and a citation to the domain tells a later reader nothing about which sentence was relied on. Quote the page title and its address. Pages are unsigned, so no author attribution is expected or wanted.

Diagrams may be reproduced with attribution provided the caption travels with them, because the caption carries the method and a figure without its method is a number without a meaning. Text may be quoted freely at ordinary length. Where a page states that a figure was calculated here rather than measured, that statement is part of the figure and should be carried across with it.

If a page you cited has since been corrected, the corrected version is the one at the address: corrections are made in the sentence they affect rather than kept in a separate log, for the reasons given below.

Corrections

If a figure or a description here is wrong, write to the address on the contact page with the source that shows it. Corrections are made on the page itself, in the sentence they affect, rather than accumulated in a separate log — a reader arriving at a page should see the corrected version, not a footnote explaining that one exists.

The full list of documents the site relies on is kept on a single sources page so that it can be checked in one pass rather than reconstructed from footnotes across thirty pages.