I would lean slightly in the direction of human-made. I think it helps
to emphasise the human activity involved. As Jane mentioned, animals can make
things to.
If I remember correctly I already used the term ‘Human-Made Object’ to talk
about E22 in this webinar
(https://dh-tech.github.io/workshops/2018-10-15-CIDOC-CRMbyPractice/).
From: Crm-sig <[email protected]> on behalf of Christian-Emil
Smith Ore <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, April 13, 2019 9:26 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Crm-sig] New Issue: Re-label E22, E25, E71 to remove "Man-"
Dear all,
Martin's reflections are good.
An extra comment: As we all know language use reflect social and power
structures. It is my view that one should try to make the language (English)
in this case as gender neutral as possible. In many languages gender neutrality
is difficult to obtain, perhaps not possible since it is integrated in the
inflection morphology (e.g. Russian).
However, there is no reason to make CRM labels gender specific except for
mother and father. In English ‘man’ can be used in the meaning ‘humanity’ and
unspecified persons (as far as I understand it) which is not very good for
gender equality. Maybe one should try to replace ‘man’ by ‘human’. This is a
big task, and perhaps not possible in many groups (like the one represented by
J R-M). In the group of CRM users it should not be problematic.
The question is: Should we replace ‘man-made’ by ‘human-made’, or by ‘made’.
‘human-made’ is already in use (‘The planet's average surface temperature has
risen about 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit (0.9 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th
century, a change driven largely by increased carbon dioxide and other
human-made emissions into the atmosphere’ NASA) and stress the fact that humans
are involved. Rob mentioned that ‘human made’ is quite a mouthful. Well, it
will add one syllable and two letters which is not very much.
Best,
Christian-Emil
From: Crm-sig <[email protected]> on behalf of Martin Doerr
<[email protected]>
Sent: 12 April 2019 19:47
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Crm-sig] New Issue: Re-label E22, E25, E71 to remove "Man-" 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
wikipediahttps://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
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Computer Science Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas
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