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 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.
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.
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). 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).
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
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>
