RFD: humanities.literature.english.shakespeare
Martin B Hyatt
unmoderated group humanities.literature.english.shakespeare
Group Name: humanities.literature.english.shakespeare
Status: unmoderated
Distribution: world-wide
Summary: poetry, plays, and history of author William Shakespeare
Proposed by: Marty Hyatt <hy...@duq3.cc.duq.edu>
This is a formal Request For Discussion (RFD) on the subject of creating
an unmoderated Usenet newsgroup:
humanities.literature.english.shakespeare
This message initiates a discussion period to consider the creation of a
humanities.literature.english.shakespeare newsgroup. Discussion will take
place on news.groups. All follow-up posts should be made to news.groups.
CHARTER
The proposed moderated newsgroup humanities.literature.english.shakespeare
will be for discussion of:
1> the plays and poems of William Shakespeare and other English writers of
the 16th and 17th centuries.
2> the life and times of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
3> the production, staging, and acting of Shakespeare's plays, and of
current and past productions of Shakespeare's plays.
4> Shakespeare's influence and impact on subsequent literature and
culture.
5> Shakespeare's authorship including his sources, allusions in his works,
publication of his works, possible collaborations, and possible
pseudonymity.
RATIONALE
humanities.literature.english.shakespeare will provide a specific
newsgroup for the discussion of the works of William Shakespeare.
Shakespeare has been discussed frequently in rec.arts.theatre.plays and
occasionally in rec.arts.books. There is also a listserv list, SHAKSPER,
devoted to Shakespeare. But there is no usenet newsgroup specifically for
the discussion of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Shakespeare was
both a poet and a dramatist. And his preeminent position in literature is
widely accepted.
It seems appropriate to initiate humanities.literature.* with a group
devoted to Shakespeare. It may be that no Shakespeare group had been
proposed previously because of the seeming limitations of the existing
hierarchies with respect to an author such as Shakespeare. Theatre lovers
tell us that his plays were written for the stage, rather than for
publication; poetry lovers treasure the sonnets; scholars never tire of
dissecting his works and those of his contemporaries. While it is not
expected that these various Shakespeare lovers will coexist in
perfect harmony, a humanities.literature.* hierarchy seems to encompass
these interests better than existing groups such as rec.arts.theatre.plays
or rec.arts.books.
The creation of h.l.e.s. will also initiate a division of
humanities.literature.* by language (rather than by author, for example).
Although there will be a few exceptional authors that will be difficult
to place, this arrangement will have the advantage of allowing appropriate
misc groups (such as humanities.literature.english.misc) at the language
level. There is no reason for this arrangement to preclude other possible
logical divisions of humanities.literature.*.
humanities.literature.english.shakespeare will be unmoderated, unlike the
listserv group (SHAKSPER) which is moderated and has banned discussion on
certain subjects such as the possible pseudonymity of the name,
Shakespeare. Support for such censorship on the listserv group was based
primarily on the unwillingness of the editor to read all such posts and
the objections of subscribers to a large volume of mail. Neither of these
difficulties applies to an unmoderated usenet newsgroup. There are no
plans to gate the new group to the listserv group.
As noted in the charter above, discussion of other English writers of or
near Shakespeare's times is also appropriate in this newsgroup, as there
is considerable overlapping interest by the expected participants of this
group.
NOTE THE FOLLOWING
This is NOT a call for votes. A Call For Votes (CFV) will be posted 21 to
30 days from now and will be conducted by an independent third party.
This RFD is being cross-posted to news.announce.newgroups, news.groups,
humanities.misc, rec.arts.books, and rec.arts.theatre.plays. It is also
being posted to the listserv list, shaksper@utoronto. Followups on usenet
should be made to news.groups.
--
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Marty Hyatt <hy...@duq3.cc.duq.edu>
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Dan Hartung
>I support the idea of this group, but I have one trivial comment. Please,
>Please shorten the name. Having to type all that after typing the "Go"
>command in Tin would be annoying. Try humanities.lit.english.shakespeare,
>or even h.l.eng.s. Most people should be able to figure out what you mean.
I support fully-spelt-out names when appropriate. This is one
such case. We (on the humanities mailing list) discussed this point
at some length, and the consensus was in favor of spelling out the
hierarchy -- not only because "hum" would have sounded silly to some
and been hard to understand for others, but because there is
more and more potential confusion with abbreviations.
SOme, such as yourself, still type out all the names ... but increasingly
people use a mouse, or at the very least, a menu system to access
their newsgroups.
I think typers should not hold back the technology, so to speak. Sorry!
--
Daniel A. Hartung * dhar...@mcs.com * http://www.mcs.net/~dhartung/home.html
\\ You got a plan? / Try not to get killed. \\ Support the new hierarchy //
// Ivanova/Sheridan, "The Long Dark" // for the arts & humanities! \\
\\ Official Member, National B5 Emmy Lobby \\ Read news.groups. //
Joshua Gross
sick of Shakespeare. HE was a woman. And Francis Bacon wrote all of
his/her plays. And, what the hell, Bacon was a woman, too. And they were
lovers. AAAAACK!
how about
humanities.literature.english.shakespeare.overrated.overanalyzed.source-o-
angst.for.english-majors.lets-talk-about.something-else
Joshua Gross
"Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and
fowls."-James Joyce, _Ulysses_
John Duncan
Please shorten the name. Having to type all that after typing the "Go"
command in Tin would be annoying. Try humanities.lit.english.shakespeare,
or even h.l.eng.s. Most people should be able to figure out what you mean.
-Robert Duncan robert...@usask.ca
Martin B Hyatt (hy...@duq3.cc.duq.edu) wrote:
: REQUEST FOR DISCUSSION
Tad Davis
: humanities.literature.english.shakespeare will be unmoderated, unlike the
: listserv group (SHAKSPER) which is moderated and has banned discussion on
: certain subjects such as the possible pseudonymity of the name,
: Shakespeare. Support for such censorship on the listserv group was based
: primarily on the unwillingness of the editor to read all such posts and
: the objections of subscribers to a large volume of mail.
I'm all in favor of such a group, and will vote "yes" when it comes to
vote. But I have to point out that this paragraph makes the moderator of
the SHAKSPER list appear to be a peevish laggard, and nothing could be
further from the truth. Hardy Cook puts an enormous amount of effort,
care, and evenhandedness into his handling of the list.
On one occasion -- not related in any way to the authorship debate -- he
proposed cutting off the discussion, not because of the volume of messages
but because the rhetoric had descended to an uncomfortable level of
nastiness. The warring parties immediately united in opposition to HIM,
and he promptly withdrew the proposal. So much for "support for such
censorship."
It is also my recollection that discussion of authorship was NOT banned,
but that all messages on the topic were grouped under the general message
heading "Authorship," so that those who did not want to read them could
delete them. To me this seemed quite fair and straightforward. Has that
policy changed recently?
------------------------------------------------------
Tad Davis (dav...@umis.upenn.edu) 215-898-7864
------------------------------------------------------
John Owen
deal of effort and his work should not be dismissed, but there can
hardly be an argument for less communication on this popular and
engaging topic. We should see an additional avenue for communication
not as a competitive instrument, but as an inducement for more
literate discussion on usenet.
John Owen
Russ Allbery
>
>I support fully-spelt-out names when appropriate. This is one
>such case. We (on the humanities mailing list) discussed this point
>at some length, and the consensus was in favor of spelling out the
>hierarchy -- not only because "hum" would have sounded silly to some
>and been hard to understand for others, but because there is
>more and more potential confusion with abbreviations.
*grin*...somehow this is all strangely appropriate for the humanities
hierarchy.
>SOme, such as yourself, still type out all the names ... but increasingly
>people use a mouse, or at the very least, a menu system to access
>their newsgroups.
>
>I think typers should not hold back the technology, so to speak. Sorry!
Heh. Sounds fine to me...us typers will just keep abbreviating group names
in comp.* and gnu.* and the like. :)
'Sides, it doesn't take that long to type, except that I can never remember
how to spell Shakespeare (and trn -G will take care of that).
(Increasingly people use a mouse to read news? Tell it isn't so...things
can't have gotten *that* bad already....)
--
Russ Allbery (r...@cs.stanford.edu) http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~rra/
Jim_...@transarc.com
should consider abbreviating names when this can be done so unambiguously. I
understand why "humanities" was not abbreviated in the proposal that
created the hierarchy. But those arguments don't hold for not
abbreviating "literature" as "lit." Nobody could mistake this for
anything else. It's also worth considering abbreviating "english" as
"eng."
Now, to my major point. The creation of this group does two other obvious
things, in addition to creating the Shakespeare group:
1. It creates the literature (or lit, if you abbreviate it) hierarchy.
This seems like a very obvioius thing to do, and is no way
contraversial.
2. It creates the english subhierarchy. This may be worth a tad more
discussion, because it does establish a precedant for the way
the literature hierarchy will be subdivided in the future.
Presumably, we'll someday have h.l.american, h.l.russian, and
so forth.
I THINK this is probably the best way to subdivide the hierarchy.
But there are other ways to do this. For example, by time period,
by genre (humanities.literature.plays, humanities.literature.poems,
or whatever), and probably half a dozen other ways.
I'd like to see a bit more discussion of point 2, especially from the
proponents. This proposal is going to set a standard, and I'd like to
see us do it right.
******************************************************************
Jim Mann jm...@transarc.com
Transarc Corporation
The Gulf Tower, 707 Grant Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15219 (412) 338-4442
WWW Homepage: http://www.transarc.com/~jmann/Home.html
John Bartol
>jrd...@arts.usask.ca (John Duncan) wrote:
>>[suggested humanities.lit.english.shakespeare, or
>> h.l.eng.s]
>
>I support fully-spelt-out names when appropriate. This is one
>such case. We (on the humanities mailing list) discussed this point
>at some length, and the consensus was in favor of spelling out the
>hierarchy -- not only because "hum" would have sounded silly to some
>and been hard to understand for others, but because there is
>more and more potential confusion with abbreviations.
>
>people use a mouse, or at the very least, a menu system to access
>their newsgroups.
>
>I think typers should not hold back the technology, so to speak. Sorry!
>
humming;
humour (or humor for those in the US)
humanities;
Hence we chose humanities for clarity.
'lit': literature;
?????
I would think that in the context of 'humanities', 'lit' is obvious.
So, typers should not hold back the technology, agreed. However, abbreviations
which are not potential problems should be used to accomodate those of us who *do*
type in the words.
***AND*** when 'lit' is used in the context of humanities, english, and shakespeare,
it seems pretty obvious.
jbart
James Alexander Chokey
Martin B Hyatt <hy...@duq3.cc.duq.edu> wrote:
>
>This is a formal Request For Discussion (RFD) on the subject of creating
>an unmoderated Usenet newsgroup:
>
> humanities.literature.english.shakespeare
A good idea for a group-- but not a good name. I *strongly*
urge that the group instead be called humanities.literature.authors.
shakespeare-- and here's why. While the division of literature
into categories based on language may seem obvious enough, the problem
is that such groupings also raise problems of national divisions as
well. English, Irish, American, Canadian, Caribbean, African, Australian,
etc., writers write in English, but I'm not sure we want to classify
them all as part of "English literature." Doing so would rankle many
people on the net and could make future discussions unnecessarily
political and contentious.
While dividing h.literature.* up into language/national-based
divisions will probably work well for *.misc groups, it can become very
problematic when you want to do the same for individual authors. For
Shakespeare, admittedly, it's not so tricky-- he can easily be fitted into
the slot of "English literature". But let's take another prominent
author, like James Joyce. Should he be in h.l.english.* or h.l.irish?
Or what about Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett and other authors who wrote
in more than one language. Or T.S. Eliot? In h.l.american.* or in
h.l.english? And what on earth would you do with someone like Ezra
Pound? These are only a few of the more obvious and likely examples.
It would be far better to establish a separate and h.l.authors.*
subhierarchy within a humanities.literature.* hierarchy, and thereby
avoid having lengthy, protracted, and politicized hair-splitting debates
on what type of literature an individual author should be classified
in. Let's just avoid that whole future problem by creating a separate
h.l.authors.* hierarchy now. It will make things a *lot* simpler.
>The creation of h.l.e.s. will also initiate a division of
>humanities.literature.* by language (rather than by author, for example).
>Although there will be a few exceptional authors that will be difficult
>to place, this arrangement will have the advantage of allowing appropriate
>misc groups (such as humanities.literature.english.misc) at the language
>level.
Such groups as h.l.english.misc could-- and certainly will-- be
created anyway. And it's not just a "few exceptional authors" that will
be difficult to place-- it will be many authors, including some of the
most prominent ones. Let's just avoid the mess of establishing a
precedent of including authors within the broader divisions of national
literatures and establish a separate sub-hierarchy for them. It will
be well worth it.
-- Jim C.
==========================================================================
| James A. Chokey jch...@leland.stanford.edu |
| |
| The infinite, expressed finitely, is the essence of beauty |
| |
| --- Schelling |
==========================================================================
Richard M. Alderson III
writes:
>The proposed moderated newsgroup humanities.literature.english.shakespeare
>will be for discussion of:
>1> the plays and poems of William Shakespeare and other English writers of
> the 16th and 17th centuries.
>2> the life and times of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
I heartily approve the creation of a newsgroup for such discussion, but I must
question the naming: Why call it after one writer, even if paramount, if you
intend to discuss them all? Why not h.l.e.early-modern? Less limiting than
by century, but assigns Chaucer and his contemporarie, or Austen and hers, to
different newsgroups, without the potential for stifling discussion that
calling the group after the Bard might.
After all, not all those who delight in Shakespeare care about Jonson or
Marlowe, or the erotic elegies of the random Earl, and in an unmoderated group
can start endless flamage about "look at the name of the group: 'SHAKESPEARE'
means don't discuss that other stuff here!"
>3> the production, staging, and acting of Shakespeare's plays, and of
> current and past productions of Shakespeare's plays.
>4> Shakespeare's influence and impact on subsequent literature and
> culture.
>5> Shakespeare's authorship including his sources, allusions in his works,
> publication of his works, possible collaborations, and possible
> pseudonymity.
All fine topics, but what about the questions of authorship of some others'
works? What about the staging of Marlowe or Goldsmith? (Or is he 18th? I
forget.) And so on.
I'll support your newsgroup, whatever you name it, but I'd like you to consider
the name carefully.
--
Rich Alderson You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
what not.
--J. R. R. Tolkien,
alde...@netcom.com _The Notion Club Papers_
Richard M. Alderson III
writes:
>(Increasingly people use a mouse to read news? Tell it isn't so...things
>can't have gotten *that* bad already....)
Most of the Internet-in-a-Box (TM) sorts of things do indeed have point-and-
shoot, er, click, interfaces for things like news. And as we've all seen in
recent months, those are taking over the world from those of us who use some
random program on a Unix box.
Jim_...@transarc.com
These are all good points. However, an h.l.authors subhierarchy, while
solving the stated problem, raises some questions. What are the
parallel hierarchies? And where do we discuss things like American
literature? For, although there are problems with breaking things down
by "nationality" (sort of), there are many discussion that naturally
fall out that way. For example, a comparison/discussion of Hawthorne
and Melville, would fit very nicely into h.l.american.misc (or
h.l.american.19th-century); how would this discussion fit into the
hierarchy as you see it?
It really would be worth it at this point to have a detailed
discussion on what kinds of groups we'd like to see in the future, so
that we don't put together a hierarchy that makes these groups hard to
create.
I can see us wanting a number of groups. Here are a few, off the top
of my head. Some of these may be mutually exclusive, and are listed
just as a starting point for discussion of the hierarchy.
1. Groups based on authors: Shakespeare, Joyce, Pynchon
2. Groups based on language or (broadly) nationality: English,
American, Russian, French
3. Groups based on time period or literary movement: 19th-century,
modernism.
4. Groups based on genre: plays, poetry.
Andrew Philip Fabbro
: jrd...@arts.usask.ca (John Duncan) wrote:
: >I support the idea of this group, but I have one trivial comment. Please,
: >command in Tin would be annoying. Try humanities.lit.english.shakespeare,
: >or even h.l.eng.s. Most people should be able to figure out what you mean.
: I support fully-spelt-out names when appropriate. This is one
: such case. We (on the humanities mailing list) discussed this point
With the newsgroup descriptions turned on, tin only has space to display 38
characters of a group name. So the group would show up as
humanities.literature.english.shakespe. Is this really preferable to
humanities.lit.english.shakespeare, just because you have this dogmatic
desire to have every word spelled out?
If a USENET reader can't puzzle out abbreviations such as config, admin,
comp, lang, etc. -- including, at least, "lit" -- then they're probably
far too addle-headed to figure out how to work their newsreader.
What fun the humanities heirarchy looks to be. I can't wait until we
have humanities.modern-art.art-institute-of-chicago.exhibitions,
humanities.opera.metropolitan-opera-of-new-york.current-performances, and
humanities.listerature.short-stories.edgar-allen-poe.dupin.
Andrew Fabbro afa...@umich.edu ITD User Services U-Michigan
------------------------------------------------------------------------
"I have more than just two grades of laundry, OK, there's not just clean
and dirty, there are many subtle levels." - Pete Venkman
James Alexander Chokey
>
>These are all good points. However, an h.l.authors subhierarchy, while
>solving the stated problem, raises some questions. What are the
>parallel hierarchies?
Rec.music.artists.* and rec.autos.makers.* seem to me to be the
obvious examples of other instances where people have decided to create a
separate subhierarchy for discussing individual people/companies.
>And where do we discuss things like American
>literature? For, although there are problems with breaking things down
>by "nationality" (sort of), there are many discussion that naturally
>fall out that way. For example, a comparison/discussion of Hawthorne
>and Melville, would fit very nicely into h.l.american.misc (or
>h.l.american.19th-century); how would this discussion fit into the
>hierarchy as you see it?
How about in an h.l.american? Or in an h.l.american.misc,
if you want to add the *.misc from the beginning. I'm not saying that
we shouldn't have hierarchies for national literatures. Quite the
contrary, I expect to see h.l.american, and h.l.irish, and h.l.french,
and h.l.japanese, etc. being created. (In fact, I'm thinking about drawing
one up for h.l.english myself.) What I'm saying is that we shouldn't be
putting groups devoted to discussing *individual authors* under those
national literature subhierarchies. It becomes far too confusing to
sort out whether T.S. Eliot is an English or an American writer, whether
Beckett is an Irish, an English, or a French writer, etc. No, those
groups aren't being proposed right now, but they very well could be in
the foreseeable future-- and I can envision horrendous debates as to
what national-literature subhierarchy groups for these and other
authors should go under-- debates that will only retard the growth
of the humanties.lit[erature].* hierarchy.
>It really would be worth it at this point to have a detailed
>discussion on what kinds of groups we'd like to see in the future, so
>that we don't put together a hierarchy that makes these groups hard to
>create.
Agreed. We really need to hash out what the h.l.* subhierarchy
should look like, before we establish any precedents or lay out any
difficult-to-rectify groundwork that seem likely to cause problems later.
>I can see us wanting a number of groups. Here are a few, off the top
>of my head. Some of these may be mutually exclusive, and are listed
>just as a starting point for discussion of the hierarchy.
>
>1. Groups based on authors: Shakespeare, Joyce, Pynchon
>2. Groups based on language or (broadly) nationality: English,
> American, Russian, French
>3. Groups based on time period or literary movement: 19th-century,
> modernism.
>4. Groups based on genre: plays, poetry.
I don't think *any* of these are mutually exclusive. I can
very well see a set of groups devoted to individual writers under an
h.l.authors.* or h.l.writers.* subhierarchy being desired. I can
also foresee a plethora of groups devoted to national and regional
literatures-- such as an h.l.russian, an h.l.australian, etc. There
might well be some overlap among these groups-- such as having an
h.l.arabic and an h.l.egyptian-- or something like that. I also
agree that groups devoted to period and movement would be desirable
and can forsee the creation of h.l.medieval or h.l.romanticism. I'm
a little more skeptical as to whether there'd really be that much of
a desire for a genre-based group, although I suppose there could be.
In any case, I don't see how having one would preclude any of the
others. Some overlap is going to be natural and healthy-- and we
shouldn't be afraid of cross-posting between relevant groups. For instance,
Chaucer could certainly be discussed on a h.l.english and on a h.l.
medieval without problem.
In any case, I think that the liklihood of having a multiplicity
of *types* of groups within h.l.* strengthens the argument for having a
separate hierarchy for individual authors. After all, can we really regard
h.l.english.shakespeare as any more natural or obviousthan, say,
h.l.renaissance.shakespeare, or h.l.drama.shakespeare? Or a h.l.italian.
dante any more obvious than an h.l.medieval Dante? I don't think so. This
is an additional set of problematic questions (and polemic-ridden debates
about namespace) that could be avoided simply by creating a separate
h.l.authors.* subhierarchy. I'm not saying that this will solve every
classificatory problem that will ever come up-- but it sure could help us
avoid a whole host of naming problems for single-author newsgroups within
the h.l.* subhierarchy.
Ken Herron
>>Please shorten the name. Having to type all that after typing the "Go"
>>command in Tin would be annoying.
Personally, I don't see anything wrong with abbreviating "literature"
to "lit". In context, i.e. under "humanities", it's a fairly obvious
abbreviation.
Marty Hyatt
The paragraph you cite is true. You must not have been on the
list during December, when this happened- or you were not reading
the authorship thread. The volume of mail on authorship increased
to the point that Hardy was unwilling to put in the required time
to edit a discussion that he felt was worthless.
Hardy *does* put an enormous amount of effort into the list. But
everyone has limits. This won't be a problem on an unmoderated
usenet newsgroup. And the authorship discussion was tagged for easy
deletion, but many subscribers apparently did not find it that
"straightforward" to just delete. But this also shouldn't be a
problem on usenet.
Martin B. Hyatt (Marty) hy...@duq3.cc.duq.edu
Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA
(sometimes hy...@telerama.lm.com)
Tad Davis (dav...@umis.upenn.edu) wrote:
> Martin B Hyatt (hy...@duq3.cc.duq.edu) wrote:
> : humanities.literature.english.shakespeare will be unmoderated, unlike the
> : listserv group (SHAKSPER) which is moderated and has banned discussion on
> : certain subjects such as the possible pseudonymity of the name,
> : Shakespeare. Support for such censorship on the listserv group was based
> : primarily on the unwillingness of the editor to read all such posts and
> : the objections of subscribers to a large volume of mail.
> I'm all in favor of such a group, and will vote "yes" when it comes to
> vote. But I have to point out that this paragraph makes the moderator of
> the SHAKSPER list appear to be a peevish laggard, and nothing could be
> further from the truth. Hardy Cook puts an enormous amount of effort,
> care, and evenhandedness into his handling of the list.
...
Andrew Toppan
: I support the idea of this group, but I have one trivial comment. Please,
: command in Tin would be annoying. Try humanities.lit.english.shakespeare,
: or even h.l.eng.s. Most people should be able to figure out what you mean.
humanities.lit.english.shakespeare might be a good idea. but h.l.eng.s
wouldn't work. And if you don't want to type the group name, just
subcribe to it, then no typing is needed :-)
--
Andrew Toppan --- el...@wpi.edu --- http://www.wpi.edu/~elmer/
Railroads, Ships and Aircraft Homepage, Tom Clancy FAQ Archive
"I am Pentium of Borg. Arithmetic is irrelevant. Prepare to be approximated."
lee s. bumgarner
> >>I support the idea of this group, but I have one trivial comment. Please,
> >>Please shorten the name. Having to type all that after typing the "Go"
> >>command in Tin would be annoying.
>
> Personally, I don't see anything wrong with abbreviating "literature"
> to "lit". In context, i.e. under "humanities", it's a fairly obvious
> abbreviation.
I agree. That may endup being one of the humanities.* Names get too long too
quick. humanities.lit.english.bard, _might_ be even better. ;-)
-l
--
"Yes, friends, there's a real world out there. Discover it." Joel Furr
* Great Renaming FAQ: http://media2.jmu.edu/users/leebumgarner/gr.html * LSB
James Alexander Chokey
>First, a minor point: I very much like this idea. However, you really
>should consider abbreviating names when this can be done so unambiguously. I
>understand why "humanities" was not abbreviated in the proposal that
>created the hierarchy. But those arguments don't hold for not
>abbreviating "literature" as "lit." Nobody could mistake this for
>anything else. It's also worth considering abbreviating "english" as
>"eng."
To follow up on this minor point, I agree with Jim that, in
this case, "lit" might be an acceptable abbreviation for "literature."
It's the first three letters of the word for litterature in several
languages other than English (all of them European languages, admittedly)
and would be recognizable by the vast majority of netters. I've got
to give a big thumbs-down on the "eng" for "english," however. Not
only would it be confusing for non-native English speakers (in German,
h.lit.eng might mean "narrow literature"!), it would probably be a bit
puzzling to a lot of native English speakers as well-- especially if the
"lit" abbreviation is used.
>Now, to my major point. The creation of this group does two other obvious
>things, in addition to creating the Shakespeare group:
>
>1. It creates the literature (or lit, if you abbreviate it) hierarchy.
> This seems like a very obvioius thing to do, and is no way
> contraversial.
Agreed.
>2. It creates the english subhierarchy. This may be worth a tad more
> discussion, because it does establish a precedant for the way
> the literature hierarchy will be subdivided in the future.
> Presumably, we'll someday have h.l.american, h.l.russian, and
> so forth.
Here's where it gets tricky, though. What does h.l.english
mean? Does it mean all literature written in English, or just that
body of writings written by people who were/are English? Should
h.l.english refer to "English-language literature" or to what more
conventionally goes by the name of "English literature"? If its
the former, there will be a whole host of problems when it comes to
creating groups for American literature or Irish literature or
African literature, et al. Having an h.l.english.mark-twain would
look *really* strange, as would a h.l.english.chinua-achebe-- and
I'd prefer not even to have to think about the idea of a h.l.english.irish,
an h.l.english.american, or (God forbid!) an h.l.english.english. So,
it seems to be to be clear that h.l.english should refer to "English
literature" rather than "literature in English." But if you want to
start creating single-author groups within an h.l.english subhierarchy,
then you'll end up with all the classificatory problems that I
described in previous posts. (i.e. Is Eliot English or American? What
about Henry James? Is Wilde Irish or English? What about Sterne? etc.)
This sort of fuzziness won't be a problem so long as you're
dealing with general discussion newsgroups. One could could always
cross-post something on Eliot to h.l.american and to h.l.english with
good reason and one could do the same on an h.l.english and an h.l.irish
for Wilde or Joyce. But when you get down to assigning actual, permanent
names for single-author newsgroups, this fuzziness will become a bitterly-
contested issue that will lead to flamewars, mass No-votes, and
all sorts of related problems-- all of which could be avoided simply
by deciding now that all single-author newsgroups will go in an h.l.authors.*
subhierarchy.
>
> I THINK this is probably the best way to subdivide the hierarchy.
> But there are other ways to do this. For example, by time period,
> by genre (humanities.literature.plays, humanities.literature.poems,
> or whatever), and probably half a dozen other ways.
Indeed, and there's no real reason why there can't be a
multiplicity of different kinds of divisions-- just as there are
in the university. As I said in a previous post, there's no real
reason why you can't have h.l.english *and* h.l.renaissance *and*
say, h.l.drama. These categories aren't exclusive in the modern
university, in textsbooks, or in literary discourse, and there's
no reason why they should be on the net either.
Natasha Elizabeth Dehn
I'm all in favor of getting a literature hierarchy going! But I'm
wondering whether this one should be humanities.lit.english.renaissance
instead of .shakespeare. After all, the charter proposes to cover
authors other than shakespeare, and if so, the name should reflect the
subjects. The alternative is a narrower focus, and indeed, at some point
that might be justified, but at this point a broader appeal is probably
desirable.
On a related note, there's the question of whether 17th century English
lit (should this be British lit?) needs a separate group, and so should
not be covered in this charter. 17th century lit. is generally taught as
a separate field (again, subject to further categorization).
Comments?
Natasha Dehn
Dept. of English, Washington University
Michael Shields
the big picture first.
In article <wjZKCS_SM...@transarc.com>, <Jim_...@transarc.com> wrote:
> I can see us wanting a number of groups. Here are a few, off the top
> of my head. Some of these may be mutually exclusive, and are listed
> just as a starting point for discussion of the hierarchy.
>
> 1. Groups based on authors: Shakespeare, Joyce, Pynchon
> 2. Groups based on language or (broadly) nationality: English,
> American, Russian, French
> 3. Groups based on time period or literary movement: 19th-century,
> modernism.
> 4. Groups based on genre: plays, poetry.
Consider this layout, then.
1. humanities.lit.authors.*.
For the works of individual authors. Not just authors that don't fit
into other hierarchies (a combustible criterion), but any author with
enough traffic specifically about that author.
This may get large. For manageability, I suggest dividing it by century.
We'll have problems splitting by countries or languages or movements or
genre -- and I'm proposing those in the next paragraphs. So, I think
the Shakespeare group should be humanities.lit.authors.17th.shakespeare.
It's easy to justify and name groups here. Is there a sizeable group of
people discussing Kafka, and especially his works in relation to each
other or his life instead of in relation to other works or culture?
Then we create humanities.lit.authors.20th.kafka.
2. humanities.lit.lang.*, humanities.lit.culture.*.
For discussion of the larger pictures, and for authors that don't have
enough traffic to justify their own group.
For humanities.lit.lang.*, we use the full English name of the language.
(I'd personally go for ISO abbreviations, but then, I also use vi.)
Again, easy to justify and name.
For humanities.lit.culture.*, we'd just use English names, paralleling
soc.culture.*. humanities.lit.culture.usa, humanities.lit.culture.french.
Paralleling an existing hierarchy will at least keep us from having two
flamewars over the name.
3. humanities.lit.movement.*.
For discussion of the larger pictures, and for authors that don't have
enough traffic to justify their own group.
humanities.lit.movement.romantic, humanities.lit.movement.existential.
I think we should try to avoid having them all named with `ism'.
This is the most subjective division.
4. humanities.lit.genre.*.
Straightforward. humanities.lit.genre.prose, humanities.lit.genre.poetry,
humanities.lit.genre.drama. Later, humanities.lit.genre.poetry.sonnets.
I realize this creates an extensive hierarchy, but the Net is getting
to be a very large place, and this is the kind of multiple division
that's needed. A little care in crossposting will make each group
highly topical.
Comments?
--
Shields.
lee s. bumgarner
>
> >The proposed moderated newsgroup humanities.literature.english.shakespeare
> >will be for discussion of:
>
> >1> the plays and poems of William Shakespeare and other English writers of
> > the 16th and 17th centuries.
> >2> the life and times of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
>
> question the naming: Why call it after one writer, even if paramount, if you
> intend to discuss them all? Why not h.l.e.early-modern? Less limiting than
I would say there is enough interest in The Bard to form a group spacific to
him. You could also create h.l.e.early-modern if you like, for the other guys.
why not humanities.lit.eng.bard ? does English have to be spelt out?
Hyatt Martin B
that we discuss the major points involved, ONE by ONE, so much
as it is possible, rather than everything at once. I realize
that division of a new hierarchy is not a trivial issue (for some
of you). Unfortunately, the discussion only takes place once there
is a real proposal to attack, er discuss... and I started the ball
rolling so please cut me a little... (and realize that a year ago,
I was told I should WAIT for the imminent new hierarchy...)
Perhaps there is some agreement that
1. a Shakespeare group is good.
2. a second level of .literature. or .lit. is fine.
3. the first possibly contentious issue is whether .literature.
or .lit. should be used.
I would like to see discussion of these points for a time. And
if you can't wait to get your licks in on fourth level planning,
then please put a summary of your position on these three points
at the beginning of your comment. Try it and see.
Jim_...@transarc.com
> Andrew Philip Fabbro <afa...@umich.edu> wrote:
>
> >With the newsgroup descriptions turned on, tin only has space to display 38
> >characters of a group name. So the group would show up as
> >humanities.literature.english.shakespe. Is this really preferable to
> >humanities.lit.english.shakespeare, just because you have this dogmatic
> >desire to have every word spelled out?
>
> distinguishing between misc.forsale.computers.mac-specific.cards.video
> and misc.forsale.computers.mac-specific.misc, I prefer not to use
> descriptive names for newsgroups."
But lit, when it occurs under humanities, is almost as descriptive as
literature. In any case, based on the "spell out all names" theory,
the groups you mention should really be called
miscellaneous.forsale.computers.macintosh-specific.miscellaneous. We
should also have
computers.operating-sytems.microsoft-windows.applications.miscellaneous
instead of comp.os.ms-windows.apps.misc. But people do seem to find
these groups without much trouble.
>
> >a IF USENET reader can't puzzle out abbreviations such as config, admin,
> >comp, lang, etc. -- including, at least, "lit" -- then they're probably
> >far too addle-headed to figure out how to work their newsreader.
>
> "Because I believe that Usenet is for English-speaking readers only,
> and my English is pretty good, I believe we should use abbreviations
> comprehensible only to English speakers."
Well, given that the vast majority of the articles are in English, I
don't see this as a problem. If someone doesn't understand "lit," they
probably don't understand most of the articles. Furthermore, these
same folks seem to do just fine with obvious abreviations like comp
for computers, os for operating systems, lang for language, and so
forth.
Jim_...@transarc.com
mlo...@ix.netcom.com (Mark Odegard) writes:
> In <aldersonD...@netcom.com> alde...@netcom.com (Richard M.
>
> >I'll support your newsgroup, whatever you name it, but I'd like you to
> >consider the name carefully.
>
> with the name.
>
> Mostly, I dislike the structuring h.l.english. I think the language
> should be subsidiary -- an indication if the literature in question is
> being dealt with in the *original language* or in *translation*. The
> lack of an extension implies the discussion is in the *original*
> language.
>
> humanities.lit.Shakespeare
> humanities.lit.Shakespeare.ger
> humanities.lit.Tolstoy.eng
> humanities.lit.Tolstoy
>
> I do not think there is a need for a separate *author* stem.
> "Shakespeare" or "Tolstoy" or "Joyce" or "Goethe" is obvious.
The reason for the author branch isn't because Shakespeare and Tolstoy
aren't obvious. Rather, it is to help subdivide the hierarchy, so that
any particualar level doesn't have way too many groups in it. If all
that was going to come under "lit" was "authors," you'd be right. But
we'll probably have nationalities, genres, time periods (such as your
Elizabethan, below), and so forth.
> As to the observation that h.l.english.shakespeare is overly broad for
> its title, I think exact precision will never be perfectly attainable.
> The subject "Shakespeare", at least as I understood it in college,
> included not just the bard and his plays, but the whole Elizabethan
> period. As an alternate: humanities.lit.Elizabethan
Bill Jennings
: I can see us wanting a number of groups. Here are a few, off the top
: of my head. Some of these may be mutually exclusive, and are listed
: just as a starting point for discussion of the hierarchy.
: 1. Groups based on authors: Shakespeare, Joyce, Pynchon
: 2. Groups based on language or (broadly) nationality: English,
: American, Russian, French
: 3. Groups based on time period or literary movement: 19th-century,
: modernism.
: 4. Groups based on genre: plays, poetry.
I don't see these as mutually exclusive. In fact, I think they would
serve as pretty good blueprint for the proposed hum.lit.* structure.
(btw, I don't mind the abbreviation "lit". I think it's self-explanatory.)
--
Bill Jennings
University of California, Berkeley
"I've been doing volunteer work at the Self-Sufficiency Center every night
for weeks. They need all the help they can get."
agt...@ccnet.com
>
> I'm all in favor of such a group, and will vote "yes" when it comes to
> vote. But I have to point out that this paragraph makes the moderator of
> the SHAKSPER list appear to be a peevish laggard, and nothing could be
> further from the truth. Hardy Cook puts an enormous amount of effort,
> care, and evenhandedness into his handling of the list.
>
wait for quality discussions we can expect.
As for SHAKSPER, Hardy Cook welcomed me when he added me to the list about last
January. I had informed him I was interested in the authorship question and he politely
informed me that this topic was no longer discussed on SHAKSPER but previous postings
were available in the archives if I was interested. Hardy Cook does put in an enormous effort
into the list in a professional and reliable manner and I appreciate it.
James Alexander Chokey
Mark Odegard <mlo...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
>A group dedicated to a single author is so obvious by its very name that
>adding "author" to the stem is redundant.
In terms of describing the content of the group, yes, it is
a bit rendundant. But the "authors" would be in there to provide
some semblance of hierarchical order and parallel structure. Before
the rec.music.artists.* category was created, for instance, you had
people creatingle single-artist newsgroups on the third namespace
level. Rec.music.g-dead and rec.music.tori-amos occupied the same
hierarchical position as rec.music.classical and rec.music.folk. A
*lot* of folks thought this was really unsensible. Should a newsgroup
devoted to one artist really be classified on the same level as a
group that is devoted to the entirity of classical music or the entirity
of folk music? Many people thought not-- and many voted NO on all
rec.music.name-of-band proposals simply for this reason alone. The
same is true with rec.autos.makers.* Yeah, rec.autos.makers.chrysler
is a bit rendundant, but it makes a bit more sense than putting rec.autos.
chrysler on the same level as rec.autos.hot-rod, or whatever. By
a similar token, it would look kind of strange to have an h.l.shakespeare
at the same namespace level as a more general h.l.english, h.l.french,
h.l.medieval,h.l.drama, etc.
I'm not one of those folks who believes that all discussion
on the net should be-- or even can be-- broken down into neat hierarchical
divisions. But when there's a case like this-- and the addition of
a short, simple word can easily make the namespace divisions much more
sensible, I feel quite strongly that we should do it.
James Alexander Chokey
Michael Shields <shi...@tembel.org> wrote:
>I don't think we should create anything three levels deep without planning
>the big picture first.
Everyone seems to be agreeing on this point.
>
>Consider this layout, then.
>
>1. humanities.lit.authors.*.
>
>For the works of individual authors. Not just authors that don't fit
>into other hierarchies (a combustible criterion), but any author with
>enough traffic specifically about that author.
I agree wholeheartedly-- as I guess people can tell from my
previous posts. :-) Having a separate humanities.lit.authors.*
subhierarchy for *all* authors, regardless of their nationality or
language, will save a lot of future problems.
>This may get large. For manageability, I suggest dividing it by century.
>We'll have problems splitting by countries or languages or movements or
>genre -- and I'm proposing those in the next paragraphs. So, I think
>the Shakespeare group should be humanities.lit.authors.17th.shakespeare.
Hmm. It's sensible enough, I suppose. But I question whether
this doesn't go a bit *too* far in classificatory detail-- at least
for an initial creation. I'll agree that a humanities.lit.authors.*
hierarchy is potentially quite huge, but I wonder if, practically
speaking, it will really get that big that quickly. I mean, even
though rec.music.* has been in existence for several years now, there
are only a dozen or so single-artist newsgroups on it, and the number
of potential groups in that subhierarchy is potentially as large as
that in humanties.lit.authors.* My intiuition is that we should just
stick with h.l.authors.* and then, if that subhierarchy ever gets too
unwieldy, we could always just have a miniature "Great Renaming" within
it.
>
>2. humanities.lit.lang.*, humanities.lit.culture.*.
>
>For discussion of the larger pictures, and for authors that don't have
>enough traffic to justify their own group.
So, you would suggest having humanities.lit.lang.french and
humanities.lit.lang.english, etc. rather than just having humanities.
lit.english or humanities.lit.french, etc. I suppose this keeps the
hierarchical parallelism with h.l.authors.* But I wonder if is as
much is actually gained from adding the term "lang" in here. I view
the existence of a separate "authors" subhierarchy as a necessary
creation in order to avoid long debates as to whether someone was
an English or an American writer, an Irish or a French one, etc.--
and also to avoid having a really off-balance hierarchical situation
where you have an h.l.shakespeare or an h.l.dante alongside (and at
the same namespace level) as h.l.english and h.l.italian. I'm not
not so sure that any comparable problems are avoided by having
a third-level "lang" or "culture" subhierarchy. I will admit that it
does create a nice parallel structure though.
>
>3. humanities.lit.movement.*.
>
>humanities.lit.movement.romantic, humanities.lit.movement.existential.
>I think we should try to avoid having them all named with `ism'.
Once again, I'm not sure that any problems are actually avoided
by having h.l.movement.romantic[ism] instead of simply h.l.romantic[ism]
in the same way that problems are avoided by having an h.l.authors.*
hierarchy. But as before, it does preserve a nice parallel structure.
By the way, I really like the "isms." It could be very useful
for helping to distinguish a group that is devoted to medieval literature
from a group that is devoted to medievalism in literature, which are two
very different things.
>
>4. humanities.lit.genre.*.
>
>Straightforward. humanities.lit.genre.prose, humanities.lit.genre.poetry,
>humanities.lit.genre.drama. Later, humanities.lit.genre.poetry.sonnets.
I'm a little bit skeptical as to how much of a desire there
actually will be for groups like this, but it does seem to make sense
the way you've laid it out if there is indeed the desire for it.
>I realize this creates an extensive hierarchy, but the Net is getting
>to be a very large place, and this is the kind of multiple division
>that's needed. A little care in crossposting will make each group
>highly topical.
Thanks for thinking about this so thoroughly. I basically
agree with most of what you say, although (as I said above) I do
question whether or not the same advantages are gained by having the
separate "lang" and "genre" subhierarchies as by having a separate
"authors" subhierarchy.
One more type of group that I think should be noted is that
for literary periods. While this may be, in some cases, the same
thing as "movement" (such as romanticism), it is not the case
in others (such as the Renaissance or the Middle Ages).
Michael Shields
Mark Odegard <mlo...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> A group dedicated to a single author is so obvious by its very name that
> adding "author" to the stem is redundant.
But it avoids clutter. Let's not follow rec.music.*.
--
Shields.
Ellen Keyne Seebacher
>With the newsgroup descriptions turned on, tin only has space to display 38
>characters of a group name. So the group would show up as
>humanities.literature.english.shakespe. Is this really preferable to
>humanities.lit.english.shakespeare, just because you have this dogmatic
>desire to have every word spelled out?
"Because I'm using poorly-designed software which is incapable of
distinguishing between misc.forsale.computers.mac-specific.cards.video
and misc.forsale.computers.mac-specific.misc, I prefer not to use
descriptive names for newsgroups."
>If a USENET reader can't puzzle out abbreviations such as config, admin,
>comp, lang, etc. -- including, at least, "lit" -- then they're probably
>far too addle-headed to figure out how to work their newsreader.
"Because I believe that Usenet is for English-speaking readers only,
and my English is pretty good, I believe we should use abbreviations
comprehensible only to English speakers."
--
Ellen Keyne Seebacher ne...@uchinews.uchicago.edu
"USENET is a wonderful mechanism for making a fool of yourself in front
of a very large audience." --Lars Poulsen
david joseph kathman
of this humanities hierarchy until I saw Marty Hyatt's post on SHAKSPER.
Given some of the esoteric newsgroups that already exist, I'm surprised
a Shakespeare group wasn't created long ago; maybe the existence of
SHAKSPER had something to do with it. I'd certainly read such a newsgroup,
and if any Oxfordians out there (Marty Hyatt or others) are looking for
a tussle, then have at you!
Dave Kathman
dj...@midway.uchicago.edu
Russ Allbery
>
>Most of the Internet-in-a-Box (TM) sorts of things do indeed have point-and-
>shoot, er, click, interfaces for things like news. And as we've all seen in
>recent months, those are taking over the world from those of us who use some
>random program on a Unix box.
Somehow, "click on the Next button" just doesn't have the same ring as
"press N now."
(And how do you do point-and-click killfiles, anyway? Pick mug shots out of
a window?) :)
--
Russ Allbery (r...@cs.stanford.edu) http://www-leland.stanford.edu/~rra/
Russ Allbery
>
>2. It creates the english subhierarchy. This may be worth a tad more
> discussion, because it does establish a precedant for the way
> the literature hierarchy will be subdivided in the future.
> Presumably, we'll someday have h.l.american, h.l.russian, and
> so forth.
>
> But there are other ways to do this. For example, by time period,
> by genre (humanities.literature.plays, humanities.literature.poems,
> or whatever), and probably half a dozen other ways.
Besides by author, the other obvious way of dividing up the lit hierarchy
would be by movement. Would that fit into this scheme? In other words,
would:
humanities.lit.english.romantic
make sense? Or do movements transcend countries too much?
I dislike breaking things up by genre because I don't think that's a natural
way to discuss things. If I want to talk about Shakespeare, I'm going to
want to talk about both his plays and his sonnets, and I don't think I
should have to go to different hierarchies to do that. Whatever
organization scheme we use, I think it should put authors fairly definitely
into one group.
(BTW, in case anyone's curious, I would read this group, and my preference
for name would be humanities.lit.english.shakespeare. After all, it's even
called English lit in college.)
Mark Odegard
>I'll support your newsgroup, whatever you name it, but I'd like you to
>consider the name carefully.
I have no problems with a Shakespeare group. But I too have problems
with the name.
Mostly, I dislike the structuring h.l.english. I think the language
should be subsidiary -- an indication if the literature in question is
being dealt with in the *original language* or in *translation*. The
lack of an extension implies the discussion is in the *original*
language.
humanities.lit.Shakespeare
humanities.lit.Shakespeare.ger
humanities.lit.Tolstoy.eng
humanities.lit.Tolstoy
I do not think there is a need for a separate *author* stem.
"Shakespeare" or "Tolstoy" or "Joyce" or "Goethe" is obvious.
As to the observation that h.l.english.shakespeare is overly broad for
its title, I think exact precision will never be perfectly attainable.
The subject "Shakespeare", at least as I understood it in college,
included not just the bard and his plays, but the whole Elizabethan
period. As an alternate: humanities.lit.Elizabethan
How would one title a group that wanted to discussed French classic
plays (Racine, Corneille et al)?
humanities.lit.french-theater.eng
National Schools:
humanities.lit.novels.US
humanities.lit.novels.US.ger
humanities.lit.American
humanities.lit.British
humanities.lit.poetry.Brit
Mark Odegard
Alexander Chokey) writes:
> In any case, I think that the liklihood of having a multiplicity
>of *types* of groups within h.l.* strengthens the argument for having a
>separate hierarchy for individual authors. After all, can we really
regard
>h.l.english.shakespeare as any more natural or obviousthan, say,
>h.l.renaissance.shakespeare, or h.l.drama.shakespeare? Or a
h.l.italian.
>dante any more obvious than an h.l.medieval Dante? I don't think so.
This
>is an additional set of problematic questions (and polemic-ridden
debates
>about namespace) that could be avoided simply by creating a separate
>h.l.authors.* subhierarchy. I'm not saying that this will solve every
>classificatory problem that will ever come up-- but it sure could help
us
>avoid a whole host of naming problems for single-author newsgroups
within
>the h.l.* subhierarchy.
A group dedicated to a single author is so obvious by its very name that
James Alexander Chokey
Russ Allbery <r...@Xenon.Stanford.EDU> wrote:
>
>Besides by author, the other obvious way of dividing up the lit hierarchy
>would be by movement. Would that fit into this scheme? In other words,
>would:
>
> humanities.lit.english.romantic
>
>make sense? Or do movements transcend countries too much?
Movements are often multi-national affairs. It would be kind
of silly, IMHO, to have an h.lit.english.romantic, an h.lit.french.romantic,
an h.lit.german.romantic, an h.l.american.romantic, an h.l.russian.romantic,
etc. But there's no reason there can't be a multiplicity of types of
groups. There could be separate h.l.english, h.l.french, h.l.german, etc.,
groups for national literatures *and* there could be separate groups for
individual movements, such as humanities.lit.romanticism and hum.lit.
medieval. The ability to cross-post would render the overlaps unproblematic.
>
>I dislike breaking things up by genre because I don't think that's a natural
>way to discuss things. If I want to talk about Shakespeare, I'm going to
>want to talk about both his plays and his sonnets, and I don't think I
>should have to go to different hierarchies to do that.
Agreed. That would be silly. That was one of my points about
authors who wrote in more than one language. If someone ever wanted
to create a newsgroup for Oscar Wilde within an h.l.english.* or an h.l.
irish subhierarchy, would they have to post about _Salome_ in a separate
subhierarchy because he wrote it (along with some other writings) in
French? To avoid problems like this, there should be a separate
h.l.authors.* subhierarchy in which all single-author newsgroups would
be placed, regardless of the author's nationality or the language(s) in
which s/he wrote.
>
>(BTW, in case anyone's curious, I would read this group, and my preference
>for name would be humanities.lit.english.shakespeare. After all, it's even
>called English lit in college.)
Yes, Shakespeare is considered to be part of "English lit." He
is, however, also considered to be part of "Renaissance lit," of "dramatic
lit," of "European lit," of "Western lit," and even of "world lit"
depending on what context in college you encounter his writings in. Why
should we call the group h.l.english.shakespeare rather than, say h.l.
renaissance.shakespeare (especially since the group proponent said the
group would be open to discussion of contemporaneous writers), or even
h.l.western.shakespeare? It's all pretty arbitrary, and to avoid having
such questions come up every time a single-author group for an author
is proposed, we need an h.l.authors.* subhierarchy comparable to the
rec.music.artists.* or the rec.autos.makers subhierarchies.
Todd Michel McComb
>What fun the humanities heirarchy looks to be. I can't wait until we
>have humanities.modern-art.art-institute-of-chicago.exhibitions,
>humanities.opera.metropolitan-opera-of-new-york.current-performances, and
>humanities.listerature.short-stories.edgar-allen-poe.dupin.
I agree with other posters who have argued that, within the context
of humanities.*, "lit" is perfectly comprehensible and so an
acceptable choice.
Let me make this point more simply, in parallel with the tiresome
argument I kept making about "humanities": while I have never in
my life heard anyone say "hum" to mean humanities, I have often
heard "lit" to mean literature.
I'm sure there are a hundred (or more) opinions on this matter,
but I don't regard "humanities" as a precedent to spell everything
out. I *do* regard it as a precedent for picking a longer name
over a shorter name with no clear meaning. In this case
(lit/literature), the clarity is not at issue (or not that I've
seen), and I don't think the fact the the tag will be sitting next
to "humanities" is a reason to automatically opt for the longer
one. Perhaps there are other reasons.
As Dan Hartung noted earlier, we did indeed discuss this briefly
on the mailing list -- not that that is in any way binding for the
current proposal/discussion. There was a difference of opinion
between the two, and I noted no clear indication as to which was
favored. Indeed, the proponent of this group had resolved to go
with "lit" until told (within ordinary RFD submission protocol)
that another proposal for humanities.literature.whatever was in
the works and that he should also adopt "literature". In a nutshell,
that's why this proposal looks the way it does. I hope I'm not
stepping on anyone's toes by saying so.
Todd Michel McComb
mcc...@best.com http://www.best.com/~mccomb/home.html
Support the Arts & Humanities news hierarchy! Web or email for details.
Todd VerBeek, GWM
>(Increasingly people use a mouse to read news? Tell it isn't so...things
>can't have gotten *that* bad already....)
<click>
<select> [Delete] <click>
Yes, Russ, it's that bad.
<click>
<click>
Cheers, Todd
Yin and Yang. Chaos and Order. Smooth and Crunchy.
Ellen Keyne Seebacher
>> >With the newsgroup descriptions turned on, tin only has space to display 38
>>
>> "Because I'm using poorly-designed software which is incapable of
>
>But lit, when it occurs under humanities, is almost as descriptive as
>literature. In any case, based on the "spell out all names" theory,
Okay, let me clarify my annoyance. I'm not in favor of spelling
_everything_ out; within the context of computers, "OS" and "Mac" seem
to be pretty widespread, understandable abbreviations, and are used by
net.geeks worldwide. However:
1) "My software is so bad that it can't even distinguish between existing
Usenet group names, so how dare you create even longer ones?" is one
of the most bogus arguments to be made here in some time.
2) I applaud the trend toward more descriptive names. I spend a fair bit
of time in groups like soc.genealogy.german, with many participants who
are non-native English speakers, and I see quite a few posters expressing
confusion over abbreviations which look perfectly intuitive to us of the
North American, British, and Australian persuasions.
As someone pointed out in another, broken-off version of this thread,
there are thirty-odd matches to "lit*" in his online dictionary -- far
more than for "hum". We native speakers really cannot expect everyone
to either instantly Get It, or to spend large amounts of time buried
in their English/{whatever} dictionaries. It's simply not fair.
--
Ellen Keyne Seebacher ne...@uchinews.uchicago.edu
"Remember the good old days when you could read all the group names
in one day?" --Barry Shein (b...@world.std.com)
James Alexander Chokey
Hyatt Martin B <HY...@duq3.cc.duq.edu> wrote:
>At the risk of getting something done, I (the proponent) propose
>that we discuss the major points involved, ONE by ONE, so much
>as it is possible, rather than everything at once.
A good and reasonable suggestion. I don't think the issues
are entirely separable, but for the sake of finding out what we agree
on and want we don't all agree on, it might be wortwhile to do so.
>Perhaps there is some agreement that
>
>1. a Shakespeare group is good.
Yes, there's certainly been enough support for the creation
of _a_ Shakespeare group that we can assume this is a given. I've only
seen one post that (half-seriously) criticized the idea of a Shakespeare
group, and a lot that supported it. The real debate, it seems, is
where within the not-yet-created humanities.lit.* hierarchy that group
should go.
>
>2. a second level of .literature. or .lit. is fine.
Agreed. Everyone seems to think that this makes a lot of
sense.
>3. the first possibly contentious issue is whether .literature.
> or .lit. should be used.
I'm in full agreement with the folks who say that, within
the context of "humanities," .lit. is a perfectly reasonable and
useful abbreviation. As I pointed out, it's the first three
letters of the word for literature in several languages other than
English, and I can't really think of any likely misinterpretations
of what "lit" might mean.
Nathan J. Mehl
: Quoth Dan Hartung:
: : I support fully-spelt-out names when appropriate. This is one
: : such case. We (on the humanities mailing list) discussed this point
: With the newsgroup descriptions turned on, tin only has space to display 38
: characters of a group name. So the group would show up as
: humanities.literature.english.shakespe. Is this really preferable to
: humanities.lit.english.shakespeare, just because you have this dogmatic
: desire to have every word spelled out?
Tin is not the only newsreader. In fact, other than the ease of its interface,
there is little to recommend it.
If tin is truncating newsgroup names at 38 columns, that strikes me as a
serious design flaw in tin - not a compelling reason for the other 90% of
usenet readers to have to put up with obscurely abbreviated newsgroup
names.
[To be sure, "lit" would be a perfectly acceptable substitute for "literature"
in this case, but I would support that for ease-of-typing reasons, not to
cater to the least-common-demoninator of badly designed newsreaders.]
: If a USENET reader can't puzzle out abbreviations such as config, admin,
: comp, lang, etc. -- including, at least, "lit" -- then they're probably
: far too addle-headed to figure out how to work their newsreader.
Generally, I agree. But creeping abbreviationism, like spam, is better to
oppose when the problem is small.
: What fun the humanities heirarchy looks to be. I can't wait until we
: have humanities.modern-art.art-institute-of-chicago.exhibitions,
: humanities.opera.metropolitan-opera-of-new-york.current-performances, and
: humanities.listerature.short-stories.edgar-allen-poe.dupin.
You mean humanities.museums.exhibitions.us.chicago,
humanities.opera.houses.us.new-york.met.annouce and
humanities.literature.english.poe? :) Malformed group names are
a problem that usually gets resolved during the RFD period, and the
14-character limit does keep a sanity cap on things...
--
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."
If you think I speak for my employer, they'll be happy to correct you.
Nathan J. Mehl -- BBN Planet Network Operations -- nat...@bbnplanet.com
Nathan J. Mehl
: I agree. That may endup being one of the humanities.* Names get too long too
: quick. humanities.lit.english.bard, _might_ be even better. ;-)
Dear god no. I would prefer to avoid initiating this hierarchy by repeating
the mistake of rec.music.bluenote. :-)
[For those of you who are going "rec music WHAT?!": rec.music.bluenote is
the jazz discussion newgroup. Really. I kid you not.]
Alan L. Bostick
Why Literature? Shakespeare is best known as a dramatist. Is drama
to be subsumed under literature? If so, where do we discuss acting,
directing, stage design, etc.?
I suggest humanities.drama.shakespeare -- or possibly
humanities.drama.playwrights.shakespeare .
If we want to break down by language and period,
humanities.drama.elizabethan.shakespeare ,
but would we really want to do this, and have humanities.drama.jacobean,
humanities.drama.ancient, humanities.drama.restoration,
humanities.drama.contemporary, and so forth, at so early a stage?
Let's not be in a hurry to get too specific in the hierarchies too soon.
Maybe we should discuss Shakespeare in humanities.drama until it is
clear that there is enough interest to justify a separate newsgroup
for Shakespeare, and work with the hierarchy structure that has
evolved at that time to find the right place for a Shakespeare newsgroup.
--
Alan Bostick | [Niels Bohr] apologized ... for his tentative
abos...@netcom.com | and rambling habit of speech: "I try not to
finger for PGP public key | speak more clearly than I think."
Key fingerprint: | Richard Rhodes, THE MAKING OF THE ATOMIC BOMB
50 22 FB 46 41 A3 17 9D F7 33 FF E1 4E 1C 89 79 +legal_kludge=off
Alan L. Bostick
regardless of how you set up the hierarchy? Is there a Shakespeare
mailing list currently? What kind of traffic, if any, does it carry?
webb...@delphi.com
This is a group I would read regularly and participate in,
and I will vote for its approval. I am also a subscriber to
the SHAKSPER list, but I think the creation of this newsgroup
would result in a different type of discussion than occurs on
SHAKSPER and would quickly attract its own subscribers and
some very interesting discussions.
Bill Boyle
20 April 1995
John Lovett
fine idea. The man deserves his own group, and where better than as part
of such a neat hierarchy of categories?
The length seems ok to me. Don't most readers require it to be typed in
only once?
Dick Wisan
> jrd...@arts.usask.ca (John Duncan) wrote:
>>I support the idea of this group, but I have one trivial comment. Please,
>>Please shorten the name.
> I support fully-spelt-out names when appropriate. This is one
> such case. We (on the humanities mailing list) discussed this point
> at some length, and the consensus was in favor of spelling out the
> hierarchy -- not only because "hum" would have sounded silly to some
> and been hard to understand for others, but because there is
> more and more potential confusion with abbreviations.
humanities.lit.eng.shakespeare is neither hard to understand nor likely
to confuse.
>
> SOme, such as yourself, still type out all the names ... but increasingly
> people use a mouse, or at the very least, a menu system to access
> their newsgroups.
The menu on our reader does not have room for the whole subject of
this post. What I see is:
Re: RFD humanities.literature.english.shake
When we split humanities.literature.english.shakespeare into
humanities.literature.english.shakespeare.criticism,
humanities.literature.english.shakespeare.production, and
humanities.literature.english.shakespeare.miscellaneous,
I will not know which group I am selecting.
I can just barely justify "humanities" rather than "hum", on the
possiblity of confusion with "human", "humanism" or "humanitarian",
but given "humanities", subsequent abbreviations become clearer.
"eng" might be "engineering" but not under this head.
--
R. N. (Dick) Wisan - Email: internet WIS...@hartwick.edu
- Snail: 37 Clinton Street, Oneonta NY 13820, U.S.A.
- Just your opinion, please, ma'am: No fax.
R lindberg + E Winnie
>
> SOme, such as yourself, still type out all the names ... but increasingly
> people use a mouse, or at the very least, a menu system to access
> their newsgroups.
>
> I think typers should not hold back the technology, so to speak. Sorry!
That's still no excuse for a bad group name. Many newsreaders will chop
it to things like: 'humanities.lite' or 'humanites.literature.english.s'.
Remember just because you have a point and shot newsreader doesn't mean
everyone does, ot even the majority. In fact I would guess the majority
don't. Most people run shell accounts. Not even every GUI newsreader uses
point and shoot, the one my wife runs requires the typing in each newsgroup.
Also, you are establishing a second level here by spelling out of
'literature'. Everyone who creates a new newsgroup in this family that
follows you will have to live with that name. Think about shorting it to
'lit'. You also might consider leaving out the 'english', while
shakespeare was English, and wrote in English his work has probibly been
translated into every language used, including the 'original Klingon'
Ralph
Ralph Lindberg N7BSN Ellen Winnie N7PYK
e-mail => drag...@scn.org (best address, read daily, forwards to find us)
rlin...@kpt.nuwc.navy.mil (last resort only)
Michael Shields
James Alexander Chokey <jch...@leland.Stanford.EDU> wrote:
> Hmm. It's sensible enough, I suppose. But I question whether
> this doesn't go a bit *too* far in classificatory detail-- at least
> for an initial creation. I'll agree that a humanities.lit.authors.*
> hierarchy is potentially quite huge, but I wonder if, practically
All right. humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare would be fine too.
My thought was of the Usenet of ten years from now when there might be
a hundred groups there, but then, that wouldn't be so bad. I retract
the century naming.
> So, you would suggest having humanities.lit.lang.french and
> humanities.lit.lang.english, etc. rather than just having humanities.
> lit.english or humanities.lit.french, etc. I suppose this keeps the
> hierarchical parallelism with h.l.authors.* But I wonder if is as
> much is actually gained from adding the term "lang" in here. I view
Consistency. Five extra characters avoids a lot of clutter. It also
makes it clear that h.l.lang.english is for literature in English, not
literature from England.
One hundred groups is not so bad if they're divided the same way,
like soc.culture.*. Twenty groups is annoying if they're not a clean
subdivision.
> By the way, I really like the "isms." It could be very useful
> for helping to distinguish a group that is devoted to medieval literature
> from a group that is devoted to medievalism in literature, which are two
> very different things.
All right. I propose humanities.lit.period.* for those who want to
discuss medieval literature.
> >4. humanities.lit.genre.*.
> >
> >Straightforward. humanities.lit.genre.prose, humanities.lit.genre.poetry,
> >humanities.lit.genre.drama. Later, humanities.lit.genre.poetry.sonnets.
>
> I'm a little bit skeptical as to how much of a desire there
> actually will be for groups like this, but it does seem to make sense
> the way you've laid it out if there is indeed the desire for it.
People have suggested it; I think this would be good naming. Whether it
passes or not is another matter. My interest is in keeping a good
namespace; whether a newsgroup with topics along the X axis is a good
idea is best determined by vote.
> Thanks for thinking about this so thoroughly. I basically
> agree with most of what you say, although (as I said above) I do
> question whether or not the same advantages are gained by having the
> separate "lang" and "genre" subhierarchies as by having a separate
> "authors" subhierarchy.
Possible options:
* We create a newsgroup for X under a language or culture or genre or
movement. There will be a flamewar.
* We create a newsgroup for X as a top-level hierarchy. Clutters the
namespace; makes browsing through the newsgroups list difficult.
* We create a newsgroup for X under its own grouping.
My revised proposal for a humanities.lit master naming plan, in
alphabetical synopsis:
humanities.lit.authors.* (naming by author's name)
humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare
humanities.lit.culture.* (naming parallels soc.culture.*)
humanities.lit.culture.french
humanities.lit.culture.usa
humanities.lit.genre.* (naming by consensus)
humanities.lit.genre.drama
humanities.lit.genre.novels
humanities.lit.genre.poetry
humanities.lit.genre.poetry.sonnets
humanities.lit.genre.prose
humanities.lit.lang.* (naming by full English name)
humanities.lit.lang.english
humanities.lit.lang.french
humanities.lit.movement.* (naming by consensus)
humanities.lit.movement.medievalism
humanities.lit.movement.romanticism
humanities.lit.period.* (naming by consensus)
humanities.lit.period.medieval
I don't think that we should create all these immediately, or maybe
even at all. But if there's interest in a group specifically for
English-language literature, or American literature, or sonnets, or
romanticism, or Shakespeare, this will give us a name for it.
--
Shields.
Robert King
James Chokey <jch...@leland.Stanford.EDU> wrote:
JC> In article <3n5684$3...@yage.tembel.org>,
JC> Michael Shields <shi...@tembel.org> wrote:
MS>
MS>Consider this layout, then.
MS>
MS>1. humanities.lit.authors.*.
MS>
MS>For the works of individual authors. Not just authors that don't fit
MS>into other hierarchies (a combustible criterion), but any author with
MS>enough traffic specifically about that author.
JC> I agree wholeheartedly-- as I guess people can tell from my
JC>previous posts. :-) Having a separate humanities.lit.authors.*
JC>subhierarchy for *all* authors, regardless of their nationality or
JC>language, will save a lot of future problems.
Hear! Hear! The more we try to specify down, the greater the opportunities
for flamewars
MS>2. humanities.lit.lang.*, humanities.lit.culture.*.
MS>
MS>For discussion of the larger pictures, and for authors that don't have
MS>enough traffic to justify their own group.
JC> So, you would suggest having humanities.lit.lang.french and
JC>humanities.lit.lang.english, etc. rather than just having humanities.
JC>lit.english or humanities.lit.french, etc. I suppose this keeps the
JC>hierarchical parallelism with h.l.authors.* But I wonder if is as
JC>much is actually gained from adding the term "lang" in here.
I think it's good - especially if we interpret lang to mean this hierarchy
discusses writers who write in this language, thus possibly reducing flamewars
about where specific authors (without their own group) go.
--
Robert King || The Society for the Preservation of Tithesis commends your
PhD student || ebriated and scrutable use of "delible" and "defatigable", which
School of || are gainly, sipid and couth. We are gruntled and consolate that
Maths, QUT || you have the ertia and eptitude to choose such putably pensible
Australia || tithesis, which we parage. - Evan Kirshenbaum
Russ Allbery
>
>Why Literature? Shakespeare is best known as a dramatist. Is drama
>to be subsumed under literature? If so, where do we discuss acting,
>directing, stage design, etc.?
rec.arts.theatre.* perhaps? In any event, Shakespeare is *not* just a
dramatist. He is also one of the foremost sonnet writers in the English
language, as well as the author of other works, and restricting all
discussion of his works to his plays is ridiculous.
I agree with James Chokey's argument about authors. It looks like
humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare is the best name.
>Let's not be in a hurry to get too specific in the hierarchies too soon.
>Maybe we should discuss Shakespeare in humanities.drama until it is
>clear that there is enough interest to justify a separate newsgroup
>for Shakespeare, and work with the hierarchy structure that has
>evolved at that time to find the right place for a Shakespeare newsgroup.
Actually, I think it's a fairly good idea to lay out the basic hierarchies
of the group now while everyone is working together on things to cut down on
confusion later.
Markus Freericks
[..]
> 2) I applaud the trend toward more descriptive names. I spend a fair bit
> of time in groups like soc.genealogy.german, with many participants who
> are non-native English speakers, and I see quite a few posters expressing
> confusion over abbreviations which look perfectly intuitive to us of the
> North American, British, and Australian persuasions.
>
> As someone pointed out in another, broken-off version of this thread,
> there are thirty-odd matches to "lit*" in his online dictionary -- far
> more than for "hum". We native speakers really cannot expect everyone
> to either instantly Get It, or to spend large amounts of time buried
> in their English/{whatever} dictionaries. It's simply not fair.
From the perspective of a native-German speaker (i.e., me), "lit" is
perfectly acceptable ("literature" is called "Literatur" over here ;-),
while "hum" creates about as much problems for me as "humanities" (i voted
for "arts"). Descriptiveness can go too far; there is no real ambiguity to
"lit" (from the 105 candidates to "lit*" my webster shows me, the only
other good candidates are be "literalism" and "liturgy" ;-), and reading
those long newsgroup names over and over again is _tiring_ and in its own
way reader-unfriendly.
-- Markus
James Alexander Chokey
Mark Odegard <mlo...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
>I do not think there is a need for a separate *author* stem.
>"Shakespeare" or "Tolstoy" or "Joyce" or "Goethe" is obvious.
As several people (including myself) have noted, the purpose
of having the third-level "authors" division is not to clarify the
purpose of the group, but to avoid clutter within that level of
namespace and to avoid group-creation flamewars as to where authors
should be classified within fourth and fifth level namespaces.
>How would one title a group that wanted to discussed French classic
>plays (Racine, Corneille et al)?
I would question whether or not there would be enough traffic
to justify creating a separate group for French 16th & 17th century
dramatists at this point. Not that they're not important-- I just
question whether there'd really be enough traffic to make the groups
viable.
It seems to me that we shouldn't really be trying to predict
and micro-manage the .lit. subhierarchy so that we know beforehand
where every possible topic will go. What we should be doing is
trying to work out a sensible "backbone" for the subhierarchy so
that really *big* problems can be avoided further down the road,
and so that there does seem to be a sensible system of organization
that can allow for a sort of "organic" growth of the hierarchy without
it degenerating into a cluttered and confused chaos.
James Alexander Chokey
Alan L. Bostick <abos...@netcom.com> wrote:
>Terrible name/hierarchy.
>
>Why Literature? Shakespeare is best known as a dramatist. Is drama
>to be subsumed under literature? If so, where do we discuss acting,
>directing, stage design, etc.?
Yes, but Shakespeare is also known as a lyric poet and his
sonnets are considered to be among the finest poems written in the
English language.
I do understand your point that there is more to drama than
simply the text of the play, and that is why there is a rec.arts.theatre.*
hierarchy. Why is it rec.arts.theatre.* rather than humanities.drama.*?
Because the humanities.* hierarchy was just recently created. Now, if
the folks over in rec.arts.theatre.* wanted to "move" their hierarchy
over to humanities and become humanities.drama.* or humanities.theatre.
or something like that, I'd have no objections. But that's a pretty
mammoth task and I think that the impetus to do so should come from
the readers of r.a.t.* themselves and *not* from the folks who are
trying to create a Shakespeare newsgroup within the humanities.*
hierarchy.
Until then, I think it's best to stick with the idea of but
shakespeare under a humanities.lit.authors.* hierarchy.
James Alexander Chokey
Michael Shields <shi...@tembel.org> wrote:
>In article <3n52u4$4...@ixnews3.ix.netcom.com>,
>Mark Odegard <mlo...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>> A group dedicated to a single author is so obvious by its very name that
>> adding "author" to the stem is redundant.
>
Indeed. The folks on rec.music.* eventually decided to
create the separate rec.music.artists.* hierarchy for single-artist
newsgroups. Thus we now have rec.music.artists.bruce-hornsby. Un-
fortunately, however, they only decided to do this quite recently
so there is a whole set of older third-level single-artist groups as well
(like rec.music.beatles, rec.music.phish, etc.) thus making things even
more cluttered. To bring all the single-artist newsgroups into one
hierarchy would now involve a large re-organization. Let's avoid
having this problem in humanities.lit.* and create a separate h.l.authors.*
subhierarchy from moment one.
Dan Hartung
>r...@Xenon.Stanford.EDU (Russ Allbery) writes:
>
>>(Increasingly people use a mouse to read news? Tell it isn't so...things
>>can't have gotten *that* bad already....)
>
><click>
><select> [Delete] <click>
>Yes, Russ, it's that bad.
><click>
><click>
<click>
No, it's that GOOD. ;-)
--
* Daniel A. Hartung * dhar...@mcs.com * http://www.mcs.net/~dhartung/ *
* You got a plan? / Try not to get killed. * Check out the new hierarchy *
* Ivanova/Sheridan, "The Long Dark" * for the arts & humanities! *
* Official Member, National B5 Emmy Lobby * Read humanities.misc! *
Dan Hartung
>: jrd...@arts.usask.ca (John Duncan) wrote:
>: >I support the idea of this group, but I have one trivial comment. Please,
>: >command in Tin would be annoying. Try humanities.lit.english.shakespeare,
>: >or even h.l.eng.s. Most people should be able to figure out what you mean.
>
>: I support fully-spelt-out names when appropriate. This is one
>: such case. We (on the humanities mailing list) discussed this point
>
>characters of a group name. So the group would show up as
>humanities.literature.english.shakespe. Is this really preferable to
>humanities.lit.english.shakespeare, just because you have this dogmatic
>desire to have every word spelled out?
Dogmatic? No, just future-oriented. tin, sorry to say, is old hat.
More and more people use GUIs to read news, with proportional fonts
(tho I'm not qutie ready to give up the 72-character right margin
yet), and clicking to get a newsgroup means you don't have to
consider typing effort.
With zillions of new newsgroups, both the possibilities for confusion
and the namespace crunch seem to be factors to consider. Thus more
groups are coming in as 3rd- or 4th-level hierarchy positions,
necessitating lots more typing anyway.
>What fun the humanities heirarchy looks to be. I can't wait until we
>have humanities.modern-art.art-institute-of-chicago.exhibitions,
>humanities.opera.metropolitan-opera-of-new-york.current-performances, and
>humanities.listerature.short-stories.edgar-allen-poe.dupin.
Yahright. OK, let's go with hum.lit.eng.shkspr, that should
be easy for you to type.
Dan Hartung
>From the perspective of a native-German speaker (i.e., me), "lit" is
>perfectly acceptable ("literature" is called "Literatur" over here ;-),
>while "hum" creates about as much problems for me as "humanities" (i voted
>for "arts"). Descriptiveness can go too far; there is no real ambiguity to
>"lit" (from the 105 candidates to "lit*" my webster shows me, the only
>other good candidates are be "literalism" and "liturgy" ;-), and reading
>those long newsgroup names over and over again is _tiring_ and in its own
>way reader-unfriendly.
I don't spend too much time reading the names, tho I do admit boredom
at typing 'em out during discussions here. ;-)
The thing is, perhaps "lit" is understandable to certain persons now,
but other abbreviations may not be. If people insist on using the
short form, I won't make too big a stink about it; I just think
that the question should be "why should we continue using
abbreviations?" instead of "why should we start spelling things
out?"
Abbreviations are hacker speak (and I'm a big geek, so this is
self-reflective). But they should be used for a reason. I
don't think that newsgroup names, in this day and age, are
a good enough justification, even with dozens of extant
examples. And there are plenty of reasons to move away
from this practice.
Dan Hartung
>I don't think we should create anything three levels deep without planning
>the big picture first.
Hm, well, consider it. (I go with "authors" here.) But we also
want to concentrate on some particular issues.
One thing we do NOT want to be doing is proposing groups that are
not, at this time, viable. It may be that the Shakespeare group
is the only one that fits this criterion.
Nathan J. Mehl
: How do you know there's enough traffic for a Shakespeare newsgroup,
: regardless of how you set up the hierarchy? Is there a Shakespeare
: mailing list currently? What kind of traffic, if any, does it carry?
"Yes" and "shitloads" in that order. :)
Jim Jewett
lee s. bumgarner <LSBU...@vax1.acs.jmu.edu> wrote:
>why not humanities.lit.eng.bard ? does English have to be spelt out?
Whether literature and english should be spelled out is another battle,
but use his name if it is about him.
[ 454 ] jimj -: webster bard
1. bard \'ba:rd\ \'ba:rd-ik\ n [ME, fr. ScGael & MIr] 1a: a tribal
poet-singer gifted in composing and reciting verses on heroes and their
deeds 1b: a composer, singer, or declaimer of epic or heroic verse 2: POET
- bard.ic aj
The next two definitions were about armor. Yes, people looking to talk
about Shakespeare will recognize that bard is a known nickname (though
they may not to think to look for such informal nicknames), but that
doesn't leave much room for people who later want to talk about, say,
bards. (OK, call them minstrels or something, but you've just added
pain for no reason.)
_________ Have a favorite group or mailing list? Describe it to
| grou...@pitt.edu
jJ | Take only memories. ji...@eecs.umich.edu
\__/ Leave not even footprints. jew...@pitt.edu
Andreas Schlenger
:
: "Because I believe that Usenet is for English-speaking readers only,
: and my English is pretty good, I believe we should use abbreviations
: comprehensible only to English speakers."
Discussions in humanities.lit.*.shakespeare will obviously be in English.
People interested in the topic should be able to handle abbreviations in
the group's name as well.
Andreas Schlenger.
--
-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.
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* Eichweg 2 ~ o
* 50321 Bruehl ~
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* http://www.rrz.uni-koeln.de/phil-fak/englisch/autoren/andi/e.html
=============================================================================
R. Lindberg & E. Winnie
Shields) wrote:
<SNIP>>
> Consider this layout, then.
>
> 1. humanities.lit.authors.*.
>
I think this layout is much better then the current proposeal. It would
cover people like Willy who wrote both plays and sonnets, it would cover
ANY type of auther, and it makes sense.
Ralph
--
Ralph Lindberg N7BSN
email to: drag...@scn.org (best address, read daily)
rlin...@kpt.nuwc.navy.mil (last resort only, please)
They call it "Surfin the Net" beacuse you can wipe out so easy
James Alexander Chokey
Natasha Elizabeth Dehn <ned...@artsci.wustl.edu> wrote:
>
>I'm all in favor of getting a literature hierarchy going! But I'm
>wondering whether this one should be humanities.lit.english.renaissance
>instead of .shakespeare. After all, the charter proposes to cover
>authors other than shakespeare, and if so, the name should reflect the
>subjects. The alternative is a narrower focus, and indeed, at some point
>that might be justified, but at this point a broader appeal is probably
>desirable.
There seems to me to be two separate points at issue here and
it might be worthwhile to consider them separately, as the main proponent
has suggested we do:
1) Should there be a newsgroup within a humanities.lit.* hierarchy
devoted to Shakespeare and *just* Shakespeare? This is not to say that
no other authors could ever be mentioned on the group, of course, but
that they would really be brought up in only in the context of Shakespeare.
If the amount of discussion on the Shakespeare mailing-list is as great
as folks here have stated, there certainly seems to be enough traffic
to warrant creating a Shakespeare group.
2) What other literature groups should be created *besides*
a Shakespeare group? The answer to that question is not so easy, but
it seems to me that the obvious first step is to create a humanities.
lit.misc, for the discussion of all literary topics for which there
is no specific newsgroup. Obviously, this would be an *enormously*
broad newsgroup, and it would make sense to create new humanities.lit.*
newsgroups only on an as-desired/as-needed basis.
In other words, since people have already requested a Shakespeare
newsgroup, we should talk about creating a Shakespeare newsgroup-- but
since there is certainly to be incredible interest in topics other than
Shakespeare, we also need to consider creating at least one or two
general hum.lit.* groups. The question is how general? I think a
group that focuses on English Renaissance literature is probably a
bit too narrow of a starting point.
My reccomendation is this: Let's start small and create only
two groups-- although we'll certainly keep our minds open to the
bigger picture and to the ways in which the h.lit.* hierarchy *might*
grow. I think this proposal should be modified so as to call for the
creation of two (2) groups:
humanities.lit.authors.shakespeare
and humanities.lit.misc
Once we actually get a literature subhierarchy *started*, we can create
more specific groups as people propose them. I strongly suspect that,
shortly after h.l.misc is created, we'll see people wanting to create
groups for national literatures. These can be dealt with as they
come up and we can issue individual proposals for groups for, German
literature, Japanese literature, English/British literature, French
literature, Arabic literature, etc. We may also see people wanting
to create groups for periods, movements, genres, etc., and we
can also deal with these as they come up. When discussing/naming
those groups, we should keep an eye upon what the big picture
might look in a year, two years, etc.-- but we shouldn't go around
trying to create that big picture all at once.
Mark Odegard
Elizabeth Dehn) writes:
>
>:
>
>I'm all in favor of getting a literature hierarchy going! But I'm
>wondering whether this one should be humanities.lit.english.renaissance
>instead of .shakespeare. After all, the charter proposes to cover
>authors other than shakespeare, and if so, the name should reflect the
>subjects. The alternative is a narrower focus, and indeed, at some
point
>that might be justified, but at this point a broader appeal is probably
>desirable.
>
>On a related note, there's the question of whether 17th century English
>lit (should this be British lit?) needs a separate group, and so should
>not be covered in this charter. 17th century lit. is generally taught
as
>a separate field (again, subject to further categorization).
>
>Comments?
>
>Natasha Dehn
>Dept. of English, Washington University
If a highly structured pattern for naming groups is to be adopted, then
Natasha's point is taken.
The need to distinguish /period/ will soon enough be felt.
As an aside, for humanities.lit.eng, we *do* have ascriptive names for
*some* of the historic periods.
h.l.e.elizabethan
h.l.e.jacobean
h.l.cromwellian
h.l.e.restoration
h.l.e.augustan (or, georgian)
h.l.e.regency
h.l.e.victorian
h.l.e.edwardian
but then, there is much to be said for having a consistent naming
convention across national literatures:
h.l.e.pre-renaissance
h.l.e.renaissance
h.l.e.baroque
h.l.e.rococco
h.l.e.neoclassical
h.l.e.romantic
h.l.e.modern
Greg Berigan
>(tho I'm not qutie ready to give up the 72-character right margin
>yet)
That
would
leave
you with
only 8
characters
per
line
(with
the
occasional
long
lines
due to
long
words).
Not very
workable
in
practice.
:-)
>OK, let's go with hum.lit.eng.shkspr, that should
>be easy for you to type.
Actually, I was wondering if it would be out of line of me to propose
an RFD which was to rename humanities.misc to hum.misc. Probably
wouldn't make it past tale.
--
----' http://cse.unl.edu/~gberigan/ (Greg Berigan)
------,
,-|-, "Some say he's the devil himself." "I heard he was _
----' '-' a giant chicken!" -- Highlander Boo: The Chickening d b CC
Greg Berigan
>Andrew Philip Fabbro (afa...@umich.edu) wrote:
>>With the newsgroup descriptions turned on, tin only has space to display 38
>>characters of a group name. So the group would show up as
>>humanities.literature.english.shakespe. Is this really preferable to
>>humanities.lit.english.shakespeare, just because you have this dogmatic
>>desire to have every word spelled out?
>Tin is not the only newsreader. In fact, other than the ease of its interface,
>there is little to recommend it.
I know I've made my share of patches to it, bug and otherwise. :-)
>If tin is truncating newsgroup names at 38 columns, that strikes me as a
>serious design flaw in tin - not a compelling reason for the other 90% of
>usenet readers to have to put up with obscurely abbreviated newsgroup
>names.
The truncation is not of headers, but just of the displayed name. You
can easily configure tin to display more of the group name at the cost
of seeing less of the description. Indeed, the default setting would be
to display the group names in the same space as the longest group name
on the server that will fit on the screen with descriptions in what is
left. (I recoded mine so that hitting "i" would display the group's
description at the bottom of the screen so I wouldn't have to fiddle
with the aforementioned setting.)
The group name problem is not a functional problem. It is only a
presentation problem, and a minor one at that.
>Generally, I agree. But creeping abbreviationism, like spam, is better to
>oppose when the problem is small.
One positive thing about having long group names: It makes it much
harder for spammers to include your group in a massive crosspost due to
line length considerations (until they learn about continuation lines).
If "lit" is perfectly understandable in the context of "humanities",
certainly "hum" would have been perfectly understandable in the context
of all the subgroups made from it and not mistaken for "humor". You
defined the new standard of spelling out newsgroup names; now abide by
it.
Andy Perry
(James Alexander Chokey) wrote:
> In article <3n5m9o$7...@yage.tembel.org>,
> Michael Shields <shi...@tembel.org> wrote:
> >In article <3n52u4$4...@ixnews3.ix.netcom.com>,
> >Mark Odegard <mlo...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> >> A group dedicated to a single author is so obvious by its very name that
> >> adding "author" to the stem is redundant.
> >
> >But it avoids clutter. Let's not follow rec.music.*.
>
>
> Indeed. The folks on rec.music.* eventually decided to
> create the separate rec.music.artists.* hierarchy for single-artist
> newsgroups. Thus we now have rec.music.artists.bruce-hornsby. Un-
> fortunately, however, they only decided to do this quite recently
> so there is a whole set of older third-level single-artist groups as well
> (like rec.music.beatles, rec.music.phish, etc.) thus making things even
> more cluttered. To bring all the single-artist newsgroups into one
> hierarchy would now involve a large re-organization. Let's avoid
> having this problem in humanities.lit.* and create a separate h.l.authors.*
> subhierarchy from moment one.
I think this only makes sense if you envision other words with the same
function in that namespace. For example:
humanities.lit.cult-stud.british.19th-cent
humanities.lit.genre.novel
etc.
This seems way too cluttered to me. "Cult-stud" and "genre" can be
eliminated in the names above without any damage, as can "authors" be
eliminated from the shakespeare name.
Of course, if I had my druthers, I'd eliminate "lit" and make something
like h.cult-stud.british.*, but my druthers are probably at odds with most
in this context...
--
Andy Perry "This life has been a test.
Brown University Had this been an actual life,
Dept of English you would have received instructions
Andrew...@Brown.edu OR on where to go and what to do."
st00...@Brownvm.bitnet -- Angela Chase
James Alexander Chokey
Andreas Schlenger <a227...@athena.rrz.uni-koeln.de> wrote:
>
>Discussions in humanities.lit.*.shakespeare will obviously be in English.
So much for discusing those wonderful translations by Schlegel. :-)
Dick Wisan
>>Quoth Dan Hartung:
>>: jrd...@arts.usask.ca (John Duncan) wrote:
>>: >I support the idea of this group, but I have one trivial comment. Please,
>>: >Please shorten the name.
>>
>>characters of a group name. So the group would show up as
>>humanities.literature.english.shakespe. Is this really preferable to
>>humanities.lit.english.shakespeare, just because you have this dogmatic
>>desire to have every word spelled out?
>
> More and more people use GUIs to read news, with proportional fonts
> consider typing effort.
Do that please. I do not have a choice of newsreader, and what they
give me folds at 79. It is not easy to read badly folded quoted
quotes. Some have guis, pardon, graphical user interfaces, others
do not. In fact, ANU's character-based menu interface does not re-
quire us to type in marathon group names. But it does truncate the
ends of long ones.
> With zillions of new newsgroups, both the possibilities for confusion
> and the namespace crunch seem to be factors to consider. Thus more
> groups are coming in as 3rd- or 4th-level hierarchy positions,
> necessitating lots more typing anyway.
>
>>What fun the humanities heirarchy looks to be. I can't wait until we
>>have humanities.modern-art.art-institute-of-chicago.exhibitions,
>>humanities.opera.metropolitan-opera-of-new-york.current-performances, and
>>humanities.listerature.short-stories.edgar-allen-poe.dupin.
>
> Yahright. OK, let's go with hum.lit.eng.shkspr, that should
> be easy for you to type.
Yah. Right. I can type it and click on it and understand it. Look,
it isn't necessary that the abbreviations be obvious to the first look.
If you happen to be looking for French furniture design, you might
stumble into humanities.lit.*, but you'll do it only once. After a
little while, especially with the help of a good Frequently-Asked-Ques-
tions file, you'll get the idea.
The more distinct levels of hierarchy you want, the more important it
is to abbreviate the names. I am desperately afraid of
humanities.literature.tragedy
humanities.literature.tragical.historical
humanities.literature.tragical.comical.historical.pastoral.
Take the proposal for
humanities.lit.movements.romanticism,
humanities.lit.movements.classicism
It seems to me at least as interlingual to use
humanities.lit.isms.romantic
humanities.lit.isms.classic
Remember, we will understand the abbreviations. Do not judge them as
they look when you look for the first time.
Kai Henningsen
> The thing is, perhaps "lit" is understandable to certain persons now,
> but other abbreviations may not be. If people insist on using the
> short form, I won't make too big a stink about it; I just think
> that the question should be "why should we continue using
> abbreviations?" instead of "why should we start spelling things
> out?"
No, no, no. The question _should_ be "_where_ do we use abbreviations, and
_where_ do we spell things out?".
We don't want to completely drop either one.
> Abbreviations are hacker speak (and I'm a big geek, so this is
> self-reflective). But they should be used for a reason. I
Abbreviations are in use in every field there is, even in slang. This has
been happening at least since the roman empire and will probably not
change in the next 2000 years.
The question is if a specific abbreviation will be understandable (or even
obvious) to the intended readers.
Kai
--
Internet: k...@ms.maus.de, k...@khms.westfalen.de
Bang: major_backbone!{ms.maus.de!kh,khms.westfalen.de!kai}
## CrossPoint v3.02 ##
Bruce Baugh
In article <rlindberg-220...@192.0.2.1>,
rlin...@kendaco.telebyte.com (R. Lindberg & E. Winnie) wrote:
:> 1. humanities.lit.authors.*.
:>
: I think this layout is much better then the current proposeal. It would
:cover people like Willy who wrote both plays and sonnets, it would cover
:ANY type of auther, and it makes sense.
Me, too. As others have pointed out, it deals tidily with the
question of people who write plays and/or novels and/or poems and/or
other sorts of works. And it leaves the questions of genre, period,
etc, set aside for the moment.
Clearly there _is_ demand for a Shakespeare group. This name
reflects useful usage elsewhere on Usenet. I say go for it.
bruceab@teleport.com___________http://www.teleport.com/~bruceab/
List Manager, Christlib, for Christian and libertarian concerns
Preview S.M. Stirling's forthcoming novel DRAKON at
http://www.teleport.com/~bruceab/drakon.html
Finger me for PGP 2.6.2 key. "Proclaim liberty throughout the land."
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Fred Manzo
it
being unmoderated and thus uncensored. If we were to eliminate nonsense
where would Stratfordians get to speak?
Fred
Mark Odegard
writes:
>In article <rlindberg-220...@192.0.2.1>,
>rlin...@kendaco.telebyte.com (R. Lindberg & E. Winnie) wrote:
>
>:> 1. humanities.lit.authors.*.
>:>
>:I think this layout is much better then the current proposeal. It
>:would cover people like Willy who wrote both plays and sonnets,
>:it would cover ANY type of auther, and it makes sense.
>
>Me, too. As others have pointed out, it deals tidily with the
>question of people who write plays and/or novels and/or poems and/or
>other sorts of works. And it leaves the questions of genre, period,
>etc, set aside for the moment.
>
>Clearly there _is_ demand for a Shakespeare group. This name
>reflects useful usage elsewhere on Usenet. I say go for it.
humanities.lit.author.shakespeare
This implies that shakespeare ONLY is under discussion in the group,
whereas the RFD indicates the scope is the whole Elizabethan literary
scene. However, "Shakespeare" is *probably* enough. If people get fussy
later, a separate group, h.l.elizabethan or h.l.english.renaissance or
some such might form, leaving h.l.a.s strictly for Shakespeare.
The proponents of h.literature.english.shakespeare, however, may take
umbrage. I'd like to hear from these people, and what their thoughts on
the subject are.
Greg Berigan
>On Wed, 19 Apr 1995, Dan Hartung wrote:
>>I think typers should not hold back the technology, so to speak. Sorry!
> That's still no excuse for a bad group name. Many newsreaders will chop
>it to things like: 'humanities.lite'
I seriously doubt there is a newsreader that broken. If that level of
brokeness existed, the hierarchy name "humanities" would never have
passed due to its length.
I know of no newsreader which truncates the newsgroup name _in_a_
_>functional<_sense_. Aesthetic yes, functional no. The only
truncation occurs during massive crossposting, and then only to the last
group name prior to the Newsgroups: header line length limit. And there
are ways around that too (header continuation lines as supported by RFC
1036).
Conceding to the lowest common denominator of newsreader software will
only encourage other, more broken newsreaders, to follow their example.
BTW, I have yet to use a newsreader that requires me to always type
newsgroup names out manually. They've all known enough to post to the
current group I'm reading or pointing to.
Ismo Peltonen
> >With the newsgroup descriptions turned on, tin only has space to display 38
> >characters of a group name. So the group would show up as
> >humanities.literature.english.shakespe. Is this really preferable to
> >humanities.lit.english.shakespeare, just because you have this dogmatic
> >desire to have every word spelled out?
> "Because I'm using poorly-designed software which is incapable of
> distinguishing between misc.forsale.computers.mac-specific.cards.video
> and misc.forsale.computers.mac-specific.misc, I prefer not to use
> descriptive names for newsgroups."
Even though I use tin, I have no problem with long names for groups. I
know what I read.
> >If a USENET reader can't puzzle out abbreviations such as config, admin,
> >comp, lang, etc. -- including, at least, "lit" -- then they're probably
> >far too addle-headed to figure out how to work their newsreader.
> "Because I believe that Usenet is for English-speaking readers only,
> and my English is pretty good, I believe we should use abbreviations
> comprehensible only to English speakers."
I'm native Finnish speaker, and read English for just about six years in
school and the basic two credits required in University. Still, I can't
see how "lit" abbreviation could be confused with something when used in
context (humanities, [author|<nation>|<language>], [<name of
author>|<language>|<nation>], <whatever else there will be>).
Or perhaps my English just is excellent. Thank You very much for the
compliment, I haven't been told that before.
> Ellen Keyne Seebacher ne...@uchinews.uchicago.edu
> "USENET is a wonderful mechanism for making a fool of yourself in front
> of a very large audience." --Lars Poulsen
--
Elandal (aka Ismo Peltonen) ## snail Hanuripolku 5B15
Home (UUCP) Ismo.P...@tower.nullnet.fi ## mail 00420 Helsinki
Univ (inet) Ismo.P...@Helsinki.FI ## Finland
Errare humanum est.. ## phone +358-0-5042609
Don Yates
: Perhaps there is some agreement that
: 1. a Shakespeare group is good.
Definitely. The bard is fat.
: 2. a second level of .literature. or .lit. is fine.
I would prefer looking for groups by period first, as someone suggested
over on humanities.misc
h.renaissance.literature.english.shakespeare
h.renaissance.architecture.english.the-globe
h.renaissance.sculpture.german.tilman-riemenschneider
h.mediaeval.architecture.french.vezelay
h.mediaeval.architecture.italian.tuscany
h.19th-c.painting.united-states.hudson-river
h.19th-c.poetry.united-states.transcendalists
h.20th-c.architecture.brazil
Ad inf., ad naus. When you are dealing interdisciplinarily, this
arrangment makes more sense, is easier to search, groups the material the
way it is used.
: 3. the first possibly contentious issue is whether .literature.
: or .lit. should be used.
No problem with .lit. here. Or for that matter:
h.ren.sc.ger.tilman-riemenschneider
h.med.arch.fr.vezelay
h.19c.ptg.us.hudson-river
I agree that once you have "humanities." there, most of us can figure out
the rest without much trouble. (Or maybe even have to peek the first
time, just to be sure?) For newsgroup names, the shorter the better gets
my vote.
But what is meant by humanities.lit.american? Canadian authors? Bolivian
drama? Lakota chants? Oh, I get it...
respectfully,
DY
Dan Hartung
>humanities.lit.author.shakespeare
>
>This implies that shakespeare ONLY is under discussion in the group,
>whereas the RFD indicates the scope is the whole Elizabethan literary
>scene. However, "Shakespeare" is *probably* enough. If people get fussy
>later, a separate group, h.l.elizabethan or h.l.english.renaissance or
>some such might form, leaving h.l.a.s strictly for Shakespeare.
>
>The proponents of h.literature.english.shakespeare, however, may take
>umbrage. I'd like to hear from these people, and what their thoughts on
>the subject are.
I think it's OK as it is. NO matter what, other Elizabethan authors
would be discussed, but the major interest WILL be the Bard. (His
birthday was just the other day, too.)
If traffic warrants, at some later date
humanities.lit[erature].period.elizabethan could be proposed.
--
* Daniel A. Hartung * dhar...@mcs.com * http://www.mcs.net/~dhartung/ *
* rmgroup misc.activism.militia * Check out the new hierarchy *
* rmgroup them about 20 feet deep * for the arts & humanities! *
* rmgroup them under a ton of rubble. * Read humanities.misc! *
Dan Hartung
>and micro-manage the .lit. subhierarchy so that we know beforehand
>where every possible topic will go. What we should be doing is
>trying to work out a sensible "backbone" for the subhierarchy so
>that really *big* problems can be avoided further down the road,
>and so that there does seem to be a sensible system of organization
>that can allow for a sort of "organic" growth of the hierarchy without
>it degenerating into a cluttered and confused chaos.
Wonderful! Couldn't have said it better myself.
Dan Hartung
>dhar...@mcs.com (Dan Hartung) writes:
>
>>(tho I'm not qutie ready to give up the 72-character right margin
>
>That
>would
>leave
>you with
>only 8
>characters
>per
>line
heh. But then you're assuming from an 80-character standard. ;-)
>>OK, let's go with hum.lit.eng.shkspr, that should
>>be easy for you to type.
>
>Actually, I was wondering if it would be out of line of me to propose
>an RFD which was to rename humanities.misc to hum.misc. Probably
>wouldn't make it past tale.
You're looking at someone who backed hum.misc until it lost the
straw poll within the mailing list of proponents. After that
point, I wuz conVERted, I wuz. ;-)
Marty Hyatt
> humanities.lit.author.shakespeare
> This implies that shakespeare ONLY is under discussion in the
> group, whereas the RFD indicates the scope is the whole
> Elizabethan literary scene. However, "Shakespeare" is *probably*
> enough. If people get fussy later, a separate group,
> h.l.elizabethan or h.l.english.renaissance or
> some such might form, leaving h.l.a.s strictly for Shakespeare.
> The proponents of h.literature.english.shakespeare, however, may
> take umbrage. I'd like to hear from these people, and what their
> thoughts on the subject are.
As the proponent, I stated in the RFD that other authors could be
discussed here. This would apply even with the .author. in the
name. If it ever becomes a problem, then, somebody can propose
some other group. It takes care of itself.
Marty Hyatt <hy...@duq3.cc.duq.edu> <hy...@telerama.lm.com>
M. Otto
In article <5kQ5E...@khms.westfalen.de>
k...@khms.westfalen.de (Kai Henningsen) writes:
> The question is if a specific abbreviation will be understandable (or even
> obvious) to the intended readers.
Don't forget that the abbreviation also needs to be comprehensible to
people who *aren't* interested in the group's topic. If you pick an
abbreviation that makes perfect sense to insiders, but not to
outsiders, you'll end up with more than a few off-topic posts and
crossposts, plus plenty of "What is this group?" posts.
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/|/| / / / / / / A virtual prisoner of the VAX // I'm sorry; my karma
/ |. /_/ / / /_/ at The University of North Texas \X/ ran over your dogma
Denton, USA
J. Kivi Shapiro
>Don't forget that the abbreviation also needs to be comprehensible to
>people who *aren't* interested in the group's topic.
Another reason for this is so people (for example, the self-appointed
net.traffic.cops over in news.groups.questions) can direct others to
the group.
- Kivi
--
ksha...@julian.uwo.ca (Kivi Shapiro)
This message is in the public domain.
Marty Hyatt
question. I am the proponent, but am a little too busy at the moment,
so I think it is wonderful that Dan volunteered. See his posting
elsewhere in the newsgroup. He has set the followup to email him,
so it should be easy for everybody to do this. Thanks Dan.
Marty Hyatt <hy...@duq3.cc.duq.edu> <hy...@telerama.lm.com>
James Alexander Chokey
>Mark Odegard said,
>
>> This implies that shakespeare ONLY is under discussion in the
>> group, whereas the RFD indicates the scope is the whole
>> Elizabethan literary scene. However, "Shakespeare" is *probably*
>> enough. If people get fussy later, a separate group,
>> h.l.elizabethan or h.l.english.renaissance or
>> some such might form, leaving h.l.a.s strictly for Shakespeare.
>
>> The proponents of h.literature.english.shakespeare, however, may
>> take umbrage. I'd like to hear from these people, and what their
>> thoughts on the subject are.
>
>As the proponent, I stated in the RFD that other authors could be
>discussed here. This would apply even with the .author. in the
>name. If it ever becomes a problem, then, somebody can propose
>some other group. It takes care of itself.
Exactly. The charter for rec.arts.books.tolkien, for instance,
explicitly states that discussion of related authors (like C.S. Lewis,
Charles Williams, etc) is welcome on the group, so long as the primary
focus is Tolkien. Sometimes Lewis or Williams threads will take on
a life of their own and every now and then, someone proposes the
creation of a Lewis group. If enough desire for a general Renaissance
group is apparent from the discussion on hum.lit.authors.shakespeare
(and on whatever other relevant groups) is shown, then there's no
reason why a general Renaissance literature group can't be created
later.
Andrew Hackard
:AAAACK! Noooooo!. No more Shakespeare. Damn you all to hell. I am so damn
:sick of Shakespeare. HE was a woman. And Francis Bacon wrote all of
:his/her plays. And, what the hell, Bacon was a woman, too. And they were
:lovers. AAAAACK!
:how about
:humanities.literature.english.shakespeare.overrated.overanalyzed.source-o-
:angst.for.english-majors.lets-talk-about.something-else
:
:
:
: Joshua Gross
: "Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and
: fowls."-James Joyce, _Ulysses_
:
You're bitching about Shakespeare and you have a quote from _U-fucking-
lysses_ at the bottom of your post? Sheeesh.
(When do I get to start my RFD for humanities.literature.english.aelfric?
:-) )
--
Andrew Hackard Any sufficiently advanced chaos is
indistinguishable from Usenet.
Richard Gadsden
> (Increasingly people use a mouse to read news? Tell it isn't so...things
> can't have gotten *that* bad already....)
You bet they do: ever tried pointing Netscape at the URL newsrc:
or at news:group.name Shame it dosen't support killfiles; but then nor
does Pine, and I don't have access to anything else anyway.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Richard Gadsden C.R.G...@poldept.hull.ac.uk
"I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right
to say it" - Voltaire
Richard Gadsden
> >First, a minor point: I very much like this idea. However, you really
> >should consider abbreviating names when this can be done so unambiguously. I
> >understand why "humanities" was not abbreviated in the proposal that
> >created the hierarchy. But those arguments don't hold for not
> >abbreviating "literature" as "lit." Nobody could mistake this for
> >anything else. It's also worth considering abbreviating "english" as
> >"eng."
>
> To follow up on this minor point, I agree with Jim that, in
> this case, "lit" might be an acceptable abbreviation for "literature."
> It's the first three letters of the word for litterature in several
> languages other than English (all of them European languages, admittedly)
> and would be recognizable by the vast majority of netters. I've got
> to give a big thumbs-down on the "eng" for "english," however. Not
> only would it be confusing for non-native English speakers (in German,
> h.lit.eng might mean "narrow literature"!), it would probably be a bit
> puzzling to a lot of native English speakers as well-- especially if the
> "lit" abbreviation is used.
>
>
> >Now, to my major point. The creation of this group does two other obvious
> >things, in addition to creating the Shakespeare group:
> >
> >1. It creates the literature (or lit, if you abbreviate it) hierarchy.
> > This seems like a very obvioius thing to do, and is no way
> > contraversial.
>
> Agreed.
>
>
> >2. It creates the english subhierarchy. This may be worth a tad more
> > discussion, because it does establish a precedant for the way
> > the literature hierarchy will be subdivided in the future.
> > Presumably, we'll someday have h.l.american, h.l.russian, and
> > so forth.
>
> Here's where it gets tricky, though. What does h.l.english
> mean? Does it mean all literature written in English, or just that
> body of writings written by people who were/are English? Should
> h.l.english refer to "English-language literature" or to what more
> conventionally goes by the name of "English literature"? If its
> the former, there will be a whole host of problems when it comes to
> creating groups for American literature or Irish literature or
> African literature, et al. Having an h.l.english.mark-twain would
> look *really* strange, as would a h.l.english.chinua-achebe-- and
> I'd prefer not even to have to think about the idea of a h.l.english.irish,
> an h.l.english.american, or (God forbid!) an h.l.english.english. So,
> it seems to be to be clear that h.l.english should refer to "English
> literature" rather than "literature in English." But if you want to
> start creating single-author groups within an h.l.english subhierarchy,
> then you'll end up with all the classificatory problems that I
> described in previous posts. (i.e. Is Eliot English or American? What
> about Henry James? Is Wilde Irish or English? What about Sterne? etc.)
> This sort of fuzziness won't be a problem so long as you're
> dealing with general discussion newsgroups. One could could always
> cross-post something on Eliot to h.l.american and to h.l.english with
> good reason and one could do the same on an h.l.english and an h.l.irish
> for Wilde or Joyce. But when you get down to assigning actual, permanent
> names for single-author newsgroups, this fuzziness will become a bitterly-
> contested issue that will lead to flamewars, mass No-votes, and
> all sorts of related problems-- all of which could be avoided simply
> by deciding now that all single-author newsgroups will go in an h.l.authors.*
> subhierarchy.
>
I suggest that h.l.english be a hierarchy for discussion in English
of writings in English. I don't have a problem with h.l.english.mark-twain
I think we should have a h.l.english.misc from the start for discussion
of all subjects involving literature in English except Shakespeare.
Perhaps h.l.in-english.* would be a better group name.
I further suggest that a policy be established that h.l.french will
be for discussion in English of writings in French and h.l.francais
will be for discussion _en_Francais_ of writings in French; etc.
> >
> > I THINK this is probably the best way to subdivide the hierarchy.
> > But there are other ways to do this. For example, by time period,
> > by genre (humanities.literature.plays, humanities.literature.poems,
> > or whatever), and probably half a dozen other ways.
>
> Indeed, and there's no real reason why there can't be a
> multiplicity of different kinds of divisions-- just as there are
> in the university. As I said in a previous post, there's no real
> reason why you can't have h.l.english *and* h.l.renaissance *and*
> say, h.l.drama. These categories aren't exclusive in the modern
> university, in textsbooks, or in literary discourse, and there's
> no reason why they should be on the net either.
Richard Gadsden
>
> In <4uomvELk...@teleport.com> bru...@teleport.com (Bruce Baugh)
> writes:
>
> >In article <rlindberg-220...@192.0.2.1>,
> >rlin...@kendaco.telebyte.com (R. Lindberg & E. Winnie) wrote:
> >
> >:> 1. humanities.lit.authors.*.
> >:>
> >:I think this layout is much better then the current proposeal. It
> >:would cover people like Willy who wrote both plays and sonnets,
> >:it would cover ANY type of auther, and it makes sense.
> >
> >Me, too. As others have pointed out, it deals tidily with the
> >question of people who write plays and/or novels and/or poems and/or
> >other sorts of works. And it leaves the questions of genre, period,
> >etc, set aside for the moment.
> >
> >Clearly there _is_ demand for a Shakespeare group. This name
> >reflects useful usage elsewhere on Usenet. I say go for it.
>
> humanities.lit.author.shakespeare
>
> whereas the RFD indicates the scope is the whole Elizabethan literary
> scene. However, "Shakespeare" is *probably* enough. If people get fussy
> later, a separate group, h.l.elizabethan or h.l.english.renaissance or
> some such might form, leaving h.l.a.s strictly for Shakespeare.
>
> The proponents of h.literature.english.shakespeare, however, may take
> umbrage. I'd like to hear from these people, and what their thoughts on
> the subject are.
So, in 2-3 years time a newbie comes and sees h.l.author(s).*
and sees a (not necessarily alphabetcally sorted) list of
200 groups, not all of whom he recognises, no idea even of which
language they wrote in. Especially bad with those who write in
languages other than English - do we discuss them in English
(except for quotations) or in the language they wrote in,
or a mish-mash of both, making the group unreadable
Imagine for a second what h.l.a.racine is going to be like.
No, I propose h.l.in-english.*
h.l.in-english.misc
h.l.in-english.english.renaissance
^^^^^^^
*Country*
h.l.in-english.shakespeare
h.l.in-french.french.19th-century
h.l.in-french.hugo
h.l.en-francais.hugo
h.l.en-francais.francais.19eme-siecle
Andy Perry
<C.R.G...@politics.hull.ac.uk> wrote:
> So, in 2-3 years time a newbie comes and sees h.l.author(s).*
> and sees a (not necessarily alphabetcally sorted) list of
> 200 groups, not all of whom he recognises, no idea even of which
> language they wrote in.
Excuse me, but this is another issue of stupid newsreaders. If your
software doesn't alphabetize your newsgroup list, then it should be put
out of its misery, not used as an argument against large hierarchies.
Come to think of it, how could this newbie even find a list of humanities
groups?
> Especially bad with those who write in
> languages other than English - do we discuss them in English
> (except for quotations) or in the language they wrote in,
> or a mish-mash of both, making the group unreadable
> Imagine for a second what h.l.a.racine is going to be like.
>
> No, I propose h.l.in-english.*
> h.l.in-english.misc
> h.l.in-english.english.renaissance
> ^^^^^^^
> *Country*
>
> h.l.in-english.shakespeare
> h.l.in-french.french.19th-century
> h.l.in-french.hugo
> h.l.en-francais.hugo
> h.l.en-francais.francais.19eme-siecle
I don't understand the need for this. Are you proposing that groups like
sci.chem should be divided into sci.chem.english, sci.chem.deutsch, etc?
There's no reason to intentionally ghettoize the 'Net in this fashion.
Dick Wisan
> In article <3oqrid$a...@wimbledon.dcs.hull.ac.uk>, Richard Gadsden
> <C.R.G...@politics.hull.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> So, in 2-3 years time a newbie comes and sees h.l.author(s).*
>> and sees a (not necessarily alphabetcally sorted) list of
>> 200 groups, not all of whom he recognises, no idea even of which
>> language they wrote in.
>
> Excuse me, but this is another issue of stupid newsreaders. If your
> software doesn't alphabetize your newsgroup list, then it should be put
> out of its misery, not used as an argument against large hierarchies.
> Come to think of it, how could this newbie even find a list of humanities
> groups?
You are much too quick to dismiss the problems a lot of us have with
newsreaders about which we have no choice. Some of the places I have
to work require that I either punch, one at a time, at an average of 3
seconds per punch, past innumerable newsgroup names in no recognizable
order or type in their names while unable to see what I'm typing.
When they get something better that I can use, _then_ I'll get to scoff
at people who insist on using such inadequate equipment.
Scot Art
>No, I propose h.l.in-english.*
>h.l.in-english.misc
>h.l.in-english.english.renaissance
> ^^^^^^^
No es bueno, no me gusta nada. (that's not good I don't like this at
all). Each author group will have an RFC and the proposers can make
whatever statements that they like about the language they expect to see
the group use.
Its messy and even more confusing than the proposed h.l.english or
h.l.authors structure. English literature is english literature
regardless of what language its *translated* to, similiarly for French
Lit or any other national or cultural Literature.
ciao, scot.
--
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Daniel Hartung
gloves again. ;-)
Richard Gadsden <C.R.G...@politics.hull.ac.uk> wrote:
>So, in 2-3 years time a newbie comes and sees h.l.author(s).*
>and sees a (not necessarily alphabetcally sorted) list of
>200 groups, not all of whom he recognises, no idea even of which
>language they wrote in.
a) I seriously doubt that there are 200 authors who can pass
a usenet vote.
b) of those that can, this very fact ensure that they'd be
well enough known that the confusion you mention is a non-issue.
Especially bad with those who write in
>languages other than English - do we discuss them in English
>(except for quotations) or in the language they wrote in,
>or a mish-mash of both, making the group unreadable
>Imagine for a second what h.l.a.racine is going to be like.
Well, the language of Usenet is still basically English.
From your argument you'd expect soc.culture.korean to be
mostly posted in Korean -- it's not. And when someone
doesn't, it can usually be dealt with.
>No, I propose h.l.in-english.*
>h.l.in-english.misc
>h.l.in-english.english.renaissance
> ^^^^^^^
> *Country*
>
>h.l.in-english.shakespeare
>h.l.in-french.french.19th-century
>h.l.in-french.hugo
>h.l.en-francais.hugo
>h.l.en-francais.francais.19eme-siecle
Is this a joke? Seriously, is this a joke? "en-francais"?
Would never pass.
--
Daniel A. Hartung | Usenet now has an Arts/Humanities hierarchy!
dhar...@mcs.com |
dhar...@chinet.chinet.com | Look for "humanities.misc" at your site soon!
http://www.mcs.net/~dhartung/ |