Dear Francesco,
On 5/22/2018 10:10 AM, Francesco Beretta wrote:
Dear all,
Collecting materials in order to prepare a discussion and
documentation about a CRM extension devoted to « capturing all social
documentation. Its scope will be social norms and social life »
(Minutes SIG Cologne 2018), I came across two issues which seem to me
to be essential, and about which I would kindly ask you to have a
discussion in the SIG.
I will first provide following examples out of historical research /
social life.
A. Let assume we have to model following two states of affairs :
1.
Mr. X was in charge as a full professor of history at Lyon
University from date_1 to date_2
2.
Mr. X taught digital humanities and Python to students from date_1
to date_2
The first state of affairs is about the quality of a person, the
second about his/her activity : he was charged to teach history but
instead taught DH and a programming language.
The second state of affairs can be modeled as an activity
Yes, indeed
but what about the first one ? I wouldn’t speak about a state, which
is confusing, but about a temporal restricted quality of a person.
He/she was in possession of this quality but taught something else
(activity). This phemenon can be understood in my opinion within the
conceptual framework of E3_Condition_State if we enlarge the scope not
only to « physical conditions » but also to social phenomena, in a new
class called « Social quality » or similar.
If we regard that he had a contract, i.e., a legal status, then we could
talk about all contractual relations as temporal entities. The professor
has a relationship as professor with the University with an expectation
of service provision. I would not talk about a quality, whereas being a
child would be a temporary quality.
Sometimes, they seem to appear under "institutions", or "being
"institutionalized" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institution)
see also : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage
Some sociologists may provide some insight.
I see in common, that these relationships are:
1) Socially or legally respected (they affect the behavior of other
members of the society).
2) Associated with rights and obligations over their existence.
3) They come into being and end with an explicit act of declaration or
indirectly through other publicly acknowledged events, such as via
heritage at birth or death.
4) They are as such not observable. Only the social memory of the
initializing event or document keeping establishes their on-going validity.
Would you agree with these characteristics?
We could talk about "institutionalized social relations", including
employments, ownership, marriage, etc. as kinds of temporal entities.
B. A second example is about the ownership of property, e.g. a
farmhouse, or of a firm, or many different of them at different time
spans. Of course we could model all acquisitions and sales of these
properties but not only historical sources often do not provide us
with sufficient knowledge on how the property was accessed, but also,
and primarily, the phenomenon we want to model for studying social
life is property as such, it’s amount, it’s evolution, it’s influence
on other aspects of social relationships. So the issue is how to model
the phenomenon of property as such, and if property (as a power of
disposal) is a phenomenon at all.
Considering these two examples, and recent discussions on the SIG list
and meetings, and Martin’s prosal concerning /symogih.org/ examples,
two issues are raised in my mind which would need some clarification
and discussion.
1. Can possession of social qualities, or right of use/power of
disposal, or similar kinds of aspects of social life, or event the
state of mind or belief of someone, be considered as phenomena ? And
therefore be modeled as /Temporal entities/ ? In the point of view of
the study of social life, in my opinion, the answer would be positive.
Agreed.
2. About the recent discussions concerning timed relations, i.e.
properties having limited validity in time : some of them, if related
to social life (those concerning property or the possession of
qualities), appear to me to be in fact social phenomena, therefore
/Temporal entities/. They are relevant to social life and can be
indirectly oberved (using sources).
See above, yes, through sources and memories. Being married may be
signaled by a wedding ring.
By the way, historical events are also only indirectly observed and
their temporal and spatial projection depends also on the breakdown we
choose from an epistemological point of view (e.g. a historical
process like a battle can be modelled as one complex activity or the
process of the battle can be decomposed in all its stages, as distinct
instances of activity).
Sure, the difference being that things like being owner is a passive
thing, nothing really happens. The only question is, if actions are
compatible with the status. The battle as a whole and in all its
detailed atrocities is something that is materially there.
These are the two issues I’d like to discuss in order to be able to
collect and reorder materials and prepare a proposal of classes and
properties concerning social norms and life.
All the best,
Martin
All the best
Francesco Beretta
----
Chargé de recherche au CNRS,
Responsable du Pôle histoire numérique,
Laboratoire de recherche historique Rhône-Alpes
CNRS UMR 5190 LARHRA,
I.S.H.,
14, Avenue Berthelot
69363 LYON CEDEX 07
+ 33 (0)6 51 84 48 84
Le Pôle histoire numérique
<http://larhra.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/pole-histoire-numerique> du LARHRA
Le projet symogih.org <http://symogih.org/>
Le projet dataforhistory.org <http://dataforhistory.org/>
SPARQL endpoint <http://symogih.org/?q=rdf-publication>
Portail de ressources géo-historiques GEO-LARHRA
<http://geo-larhra.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/>
Portail de ressources textuelles
<http://xml-portal.symogih.org/index.html> au format XML
Cours Outils numériques
<http://phn-wiki.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/doku.php?id=td_histoire_numerique:accueil>pour
les historiens
<http://phn-wiki.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/doku.php?id=td_histoire_numerique:accueil>
Publications
<https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/search/index/?qa[auth_t][]=Francesco+Beretta&sort=producedDate_tdate+desc>
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