creator names summary

[Donald Dale Milne]

OK, I'm summing up our previous discussion on creator names.
(Sorry about the delay, but I had a long stretch of out of town work.)

Each Creator Record should record one of:
GCD Official Name (full name as we determine most representative of
their comic work, or their name in the Who's Who, or their requested
name from our new questionnaire)
Given name, and uncertainty field
Middle (or additional given) names, and uncertainty fields (how
many should we record, 2 middle names is not uncommon?)
Family Name (or Surname), and uncertainty field
Year of birth, Month of birth, Date of birth, and uncertainty fields
Year of death, Month of death, Date of death, and uncertainty fields
birth_country, birth_state/province, birth_city, and uncertainty
fields
death_country, death_state/province, death_city, and uncertainty fields
"cf." links to similar persons (may be multiple links)
And, or course, a Notes field

For all other names, record:
Type of name (Multiple types could be checked per name.)
For types, we mentioned:
"common" name - most commonly used name in comics (not sure how
we would determine)
pen name - any known signature, alias, abbreviation, or
collaboration (a collaboration may need a Note or a link to the other
name(s))
house name - signature worked under
shop name - name of shop worked for
changed name due to legal change (including marriage or gender
change))
change date, and uncertainty field (to record legal change); other
date ranges for other names would be supplied by links back to the
recorded credits
And, or course, a Notes field

A table of creator images could record one (or more) image per
creator. Self-portrait if available; if not, a photo; if not, portrait
by another artist. We would need to be concerned about image copyrights.

If you see some omissions from our discussion, let me know.
Otherwise, I'll move on to another topic in a few days.

- Don Milne

[Henry Andrews]

Apologies for diving in after being quiet on this before, but here are my thoughts.

Keep in mind the need to support dual non-hyphenated family names, and potentially creators who use only one name (either as a personal choice or by being from a culture that uses single names).  You might want to go with "given" and "family" and just make them long.  Middle names are just additional given names anyway- the first one isn't even guaranteed to be the one most often in use.

I would avoid the "common" name field.  Just link credits by the name used on the credit (if any), and folks can then look at how often each name was used and draw their own conclusions.

Names should all be in one table, with a link to the canonical name (self-join on the same table).  The canonical name should link to itself.  That way you can *always* go to the canonical name, and it will always be correct, whether you were already on a canonical record or not.  I'm not quite sure about recording change dates (by which I mean, I'm not quite sure about the best way to do it- recording it seems to be fine when there was actually a clear legal change).

If we want to notate the type of related name, that can be a flag on the name row.

Shop membership should be flagged on a per credit basis, with a separate connection specifying rough years of membership.  Shop work is never as simple as "it was between dates X and Y so it must have been through shop Z".  The per-credit is a link on the actual credit link.  The general shop is a mapping table between the canonical name and the shop record.

thanks,

-henry

---

From: Donald Dale Milne <dond...@att.net>
To: gcd-wh...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2011 3:50 PM
Subject: [gcd-Whos Who] creator names summary

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[Donald Dale Milne]

I don't think there's any problem with creators who use only one
name: the other name field(s) can just be blank and we can require only
one name. The reason I included middle names was to avoid the long
names you suggest. I didn't see recording "Donald Dale" as useful,
instead of "Donald" and "Dale" in separate fields. Maybe I'm wrong
there. For the common name, I think somewhere back in previous
discussions there was a problem expressed if our official name ended up
as too different from how a creator was commonly referred to in comics.
I don't remember the details, but it may have been way back on Main some
months ago.

I always expected all the names could go in a single table, but I
simply wasn't dealing with implementation details at this time. Flags
should be a good method for the types. I agree that shop membership may
need to be recorded per credit; this is just listing the idea that we
need to include the shop name, and the fact that the name represents a
shop, in our list of creator names.

- Don Milne

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> *From:* Donald Dale Milne <dond...@att.net>
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> *Sent:* Tuesday, November 29, 2011 3:50 PM
> *Subject:* [gcd-Whos Who] creator names summary

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[Henry Andrews]

The "common" thing sounds kind of like wanting to have two different kinds of "canonical".  Under what circumstances do we end up with an unrecognizable official name?  And in such situations, why do we want to mark the unrecognizable one as official?  Is official always supposed to be what's on the person's government ID at the present time (if alive) or at their time of death?  Do we want that to be the canonical name or do we want the common one to be canonical and let the official name just be another name with an attribute?

The problem with having two fields for given names is that it doesn't really do anything all that useful either.  You can't assume that the one you have in the first field is the one to use in a short form.  So you always need to display both anyway.  If we want to have a short form for common display, then we should have multiple entries:

"Don" + "Milne"  # short form

"Donald Dale" + "Milne" # long form

"Andres" + "Jimenez"  # short form

"Andres" + "Jimenez Gomez"  # long form

"Jamal" + "Walton" # short form

"L. Jamal" + "Walton" # long form

# and probably one with whatever the L stands for, but I have no idea what Jamal's first name is :-)

stuff like that (I'm on a windows system and don't know how to do the accents properly with this keyboard, sorry).

Anyway, the first vs middle division ends up being completely arbitrary.  It adds complexity without adding any functionality.

Sorry for diving into implementation!  I'm still a little disoriented about recent work.

thanks,

-henry

---

From: Donald Dale Milne <dond...@att.net>
To: gcd-wh...@googlegroups.com

Sent: Tuesday, November 29, 2011 5:41 PM
Subject: Re: [gcd-Whos Who] creator names summary

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[Lionel English]

On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 3:50 PM, Donald Dale Milne <dond...@att.net> wrote:

Each Creator Record should record one of:
   GCD Official Name (full name as we determine most representative of their comic work, or their name in the Who's Who, or their requested name from our new questionnaire)

I think we need a policy for determining what the official name is.  Problematic are people who change names (e.g. Louise Jones to Loise Simonson; Arn Sabra to whatever her name is now; Ernie Chua/Ernie Chan) or who regularly use two different names (e.g. Jean Giraud/Moebius).

 

   Given name, and uncertainty field
   Middle (or additional given) names, and uncertainty fields  (how many should we record, 2 middle names is not uncommon?)

I'd say just one given name field, that includes all their given names.  The one they actually go by would presumably be reflected in the common name.

 

   Family Name (or Surname), and uncertainty field
   Year of birth, Month of birth, Date of birth, and uncertainty fields
   Year of death, Month of death, Date of death, and uncertainty fields
   birth_country, birth_state/province, birth_city, and uncertainty fields
   death_country, death_state/province, death_city, and uncertainty fields
   "cf." links to similar persons (may be multiple links)
   And, or course, a Notes field

   For all other names, record:
   Type of name (Multiple types could be checked per name.)
       For types, we mentioned:
       "common" name - most commonly used name in comics (not sure how we would determine)
       pen name - any known signature, alias, abbreviation, or collaboration (a collaboration may need a Note or a link to the other name(s))
       house name - signature worked under
       shop name - name of shop worked for
       changed name due to legal change (including marriage or gender change))
   change date, and uncertainty field (to record legal change); other date ranges for other names would be supplied by links back to the recorded credits
   And, or course, a Notes field

Perhaps a birth name, which would include the full nine-yards name, while the common name would not.  E.g. "Stanley Martin Lieber" (birth name), "Stan Lee" (common name) 

   A table of creator images could record one (or more) image per creator.  Self-portrait if available; if not, a photo; if not, portrait by another artist.  We would need to be concerned about image copyrights.

   If you see some omissions from our discussion, let me know.  Otherwise, I'll move on to another topic in a few days.

- Don Milne

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Lionel English

San Diego, CA
lio...@beanmar.net

[Donald Dale Milne]

Yes, we will need a mechanism for determining both official names
and common names. I like the idea of using the full birth name in a
single field instead of splitting first and surnames out into two fields.

- Don Milne

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[Jochen Garcke]

One thing I came upon is in regard to internationalisation, in
particular transcribing names from language with non-latin alphabets.
Case in point Russian, example artist Юрий Жигунов
Youri Jigounov (French and English)
Juri Schigunow (German)
http://www.russki-mat.net/trans.htm

Jochen

[Henry Andrews]

Good point.  And its much more complicated from Asian languages where there are often multiple romanizations into English alone.  IIRC Marc Miyake gave a particularly complex example from Japanese a few years ago.

Even with Russian, I'd actually have gone with Yuri Zhigunov for this one into English.  

-henry (who used to know Russian, but doesn't really anymore)

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From: Jochen Garcke <gcd...@garcke.de>
To: gcd-wh...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Thursday, December 29, 2011 9:50 AM

Subject: Re: [gcd-Whos Who] creator names summary

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[Jochen Garcke]

Could be Yuri Zhigunov, I found his entry on lambiek, which is in
English, but surely written by people used to his 'French name' and
unaware of the differences.

Jochen

Am 29.12.2011 19:03, schrieb Henry Andrews:
> Good point. And its much more complicated from Asian languages where
> there are often multiple romanizations into English alone. IIRC Marc
> Miyake gave a particularly complex example from Japanese a few years ago.
>
> Even with Russian, I'd actually have gone with Yuri Zhigunov for this
> one into English.
>
> -henry (who used to know Russian, but doesn't really anymore)
>

> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* Jochen Garcke <gcd...@garcke.de>
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> *Sent:* Thursday, December 29, 2011 9:50 AM
> *Subject:* Re: [gcd-Whos Who] creator names summary

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[Henry Andrews]

Right.  I mean, if I'd been writing it, I wouldn't have guessed that it'd be spelled any differently in French!

-henry

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From: Jochen Garcke <gcd...@garcke.de>
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Sent: Thursday, December 29, 2011 10:06 AM
Subject: Re: [gcd-Whos Who] creator names summary

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[Lionel English]

Well, this is verging into techie territory, but would I be correct in asserting that essentially the goal is to have one master record per person in a "main" creator table, and then to have a table of names that point to an entry (or entries in some cases) in that master table, with the name records tagged in various ways to indicate their relationship to the creator?  E.g. birth name, industry name, alias, etc.  If that's the case, we could add multiple transcriptions of a name in the "name" table.  And then we'd have to decide if we want to establish a preference for latinized transcriptions or not, and if not (if the "native" transcription is designated the "official" name) whether we want to add the latinized transcription on the display side somehow (as a parenthetical name?) to aid in pronunciation or searching.  And the answer may eventually depend on what language the user is viewing the site in, if/when we get advanced enough to do things like that.

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