Dear All,
I would like to stay neutral in this issue. Personally, I do not believe
that changing language is the way to make sure we respect men and women
equally and give them equal chances, and it gives me a taste of
distracting from what should be discussed. Therefore I am not happy
about it.
I have the impression that even the etymology given in wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_(word) is not complete. As a German
speaker, I distinguish between "Mann" (male) and "Mensch" (human), and I
suspect that the English "man" is actually a derivative of both,
rendering it a homonym. Homonymity would not imply a bias.
In Italian, French, Spanish the Latin term "vir" for adult male actually
got lost in favor of derivatives of "homo" (human). Would be interesting
to learn if this was actually connected with an increasing male
domination or not, or if being "vir" became unimportant.
Man-Made appeared to me a good, established term, and we prefer
established terms.
In German, we rendered it as "artificial object".
Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese do not have default gender
at all. Much better.
Anyway, if some people think it makes a difference...
Cheers,
Martin
On 4/12/2019 7:38 AM, Robert Sanderson wrote:
Dear all,
On behalf of the Linked Art consortium, I would like to propose that
the labels for E22 Man-Made Object, E25 Man-Made Feature and E71
Man-Made Thing be changed to drop the unnecessarily gendered “Man-“.
In this day and age, I think we should recognize that inclusion and
diversity are core features of community acceptance, and that
including gender-biased language is alienating.
Thus the proposal is: E22’s label should be changed to Made Object,
E25 changed to Made Feature and E71 changed to Made Thing.
The “human” nature of the agent that does the making is explicit in
the ontology, in that only humans or groups there-of can be Actors and
carry out Productions or Creations, so there is no ambiguity about
non-humans making these.
This issue was discussed at length, and has been open in our profile’s
tracker for 12 months now. We would greatly prefer that it be solved
by changing the labels in the documentation, and thereby in the RDFS,
rather than other RDF specific approaches such as minting new terms
and using owl:sameAs to assert equality, or rebranding only in the
JSON-LD serialization but persisting in other serializations. The
change is consistent, reduces the length of the class names, and is an
easy substitution. The comprehensibility of the label is still the
same. Given the renaming of Collection to Curated Holding, migration
of existing data has the same solution - just substitute the labels.
As a second choice, if the above is not acceptable, we propose to
instead replace “Man-“ with “Human-“ … only two additional characters,
but a bit more of a mouthful.
Many thanks for your engagement with this issue!
Rob
_______________________________________________
Crm-sig mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.ics.forth.gr/mailman/listinfo/crm-sig
--
------------------------------------
Dr. Martin Doerr
Honorary Head of the
Center for Cultural Informatics
Information Systems Laboratory
Institute of Computer Science
Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas (FORTH)
N.Plastira 100, Vassilika Vouton,
GR70013 Heraklion,Crete,Greece
Vox:+30(2810)391625
Email: [email protected]
Web-site: http://www.ics.forth.gr/isl
