Week Seven Reflection
Many interesting blind corners this week,
After writing the methodology paper for our SNA approach, the group decided that the fields/subfields taxonomy should be formatted to contain 10 fields with 10 subfields at most. Refining these categories has made me very interested in learning the theories and methods for creating these organizing structures. Because a taxonomy is necessarily definitive, I would like to learn what professionals do when creating the rough drafts of their frameworks.
My research on the 257 applicable biographical figures was fairly extensive, likely bordering on inefficient. This consisted of color coding and filing all of the figures to the rough draft taxonomy, then creating a new list of biographies that incorporated the Researcher Notes field in the original Master Indices document. Even having gone through these steps, I kept encountering redundancies that seemed to only become visible while working through the process of categorization, leading to six different iterations of the framework.
Some of these corrections had to do with a lack of familiarity with the fields themselves. Excavator was listed under Science & Technology and Archeologist under Natural Science because the former felt more akin to the neighboring Civil Engineer. I ultimately found that Excavator is more accurately a subfield within Archeology, just as Draughtsman is to Architect, and wound up merging both of these examples.
Catty-corner, I discovered why the historical figures are most often labeled as archaeologists rather than archeologists and the contentious history of the spelling difference. The word war essentially boils down to a British vs. American disagreement over the implementation of the ligature æ, which was intended to denote a "short a, as in the way we pronounce "flat." Nineteenth century American geologists saw the character as an unnecessary, ornamental distinction that was not representative of the way people actually spoke (this was the era of Melvil not Melville Dewey) and proceeded to punt the ligature from archeology. While I side with the American decision on this one (typical), the rest of the world has not, and archaeology is nearly universal outside of the U.S. National Park Service.
On a similar British vs. American note (apologies, Sarah!), I also accidentally confused Bailiff with Barrister in the early drafts and intentionally considered merging Barrister with Lawyer in later iterations before I understood the fairly stark differences between the American and British legal systems.
Finally, I found that many of the subfields in my earlier drafts were so particular that they would misrepresent the other elements of the taxonomy. This comes back to the concept of specificity vs. comprehension that I touched on in the Historical Network Research Methodology section. Ultimately, between planning, collaborations and practical organization, the designated fields slimmed by nearly half.
While I feel this framework will serve the purposes of the project, I am still slightly uneasy with some of the implications in the final draft. Philanthropy is such a porous designation that, even in it's most accurate usage, can simply be a plaque-friendly form of tax evasion, and Art Collector may be more accurately classified under the Business Person subfield rather than alongside the economically disparate Historian and Journalist in Humanities. But this returns to the earlier concept of quantifying designations, which I felt was a little too vulnerable to interpretation. This framework will supply all of the historical information without editorial and allow researchers to reach their own conclusions.
M. A., Anthropology, et al. “Archeology: Why Is There an Alternative Way to Spell Archaeology?” ThoughtCo, https://www.thoughtco.com/archaeology-spelling-169591. Accessed 13 Aug. 2021.
The Charitable Deduction Is Mostly for the Rich. A New Study Argues That’s by Design. - Vox. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/9/3/20840955/charitable-deduction-tax-rich-billionaire-philanthropy. Accessed 14 Aug. 2021.
Reading:
Chapter 9. Dynamic Graphs: How to Show Data over Time · Visualizing Graph Data. https://livebook.manning.com/book/visualizing-graph-data/chapter-9/. Accessed 4 Aug. 2021.
Charles W. J. Withers. “Place and the ‘Spatial Turn’ in Geography and in History.” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 70, no. 4, 2009, pp. 637–58. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1353/jhi.0.0054.
Geographies of Knowledge. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1353/book.77109.
Chapter 9. Dynamic Graphs: How to Show Data over Time · Visualizing Graph Data. https://livebook.manning.com/book/visualizing-graph-data/chapter-9/. Accessed 4 Aug. 2021.
Concept and Differences Between a Lawyer, a Solicitor and a Barrister in Uk - HG.Org. https://www.hg.org/legal-articles/concept-and-differences-between-a-lawyer-a-solicitor-and-a-barrister-in-uk-18875. Accessed 13 Aug. 2021.
Converting a Network with Dates into a Dynamic Network. https://seinecle.github.io/gephi-tutorials/generated-html/converting-a-network-with-dates-into-dynamic.html#_goals_of_this_tutorial. Accessed 4 Aug. 2021.
“Archaeology vs. Archeology: Which Is the Correct Spelling?” Archaeology in Tennessee, 22 Apr. 2013, https://contextintn.wordpress.com/2013/04/21/archaeology-vs-archeology-which-is-the-correct-spelling/.
“How Many National Parks Are There?” National Park Foundation, https://www.nationalparks.org/connect/blog/how-many-national-parks-are-there. Accessed 13 Aug. 2021.
Museums Explained - Staff. http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/5aa/5aa22.htm. Accessed 5 Aug. 2021.
Ndtv: Network Dynamic Temporal Visualizations. 2016. Statnet, 2021. GitHub, https://github.com/statnet/ndtv.