Paper

node

Sheet material of macerated plant fibre, invented in China and traded as a commodity long before the technique for making it moved. The Sogdian Ancient Letters, abandoned west of Dunhuang around 313 CE, are themselves written on paper, which shows the material had reached the far western Chinese frontier within two centuries of its documented appearance. Paper was cheap, light and durable, and it displaced bamboo slips, silk, papyrus and parchment as a writing surface everywhere it reached. Its arrival in the Islamic world in the eighth century and in Europe from the twelfth transformed record-keeping, administration and eventually printing. A traded commodity, not a place.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.