humanmarkup message
[Date Prev]
| [Thread Prev]
| [Thread Next]
| [Date Next]
--
[Date Index]
| [Thread Index]
| [Elist Home]
Subject: [humanmarkup] Perception and Peace Part 4
- From: Rex Brooks <rexb@starbourne.com>
- To: humanmarkup-comment@lists.oasis-open.org, humanmarkup@lists.oasis-open.org
- Date: Wed, 24 Apr 2002 06:49:57 -0700
Title: Perception and Peace Part 4
He Everyone,
Part 4 has a great virtue. It is short.
This is the last in this series of articles
that answer the dubious achievement award that XML.COM conferred upon
us at the end of 2001.
To summarize:
Part 1 said, "Someone is trying to kill you/us;"
Part 2 said, "HumanMarkup will add contextual information to
communications which it is hoped will somewhat offset the deficit of
communication in Public Perception about the people trying to kill
you/us;"
Part 3 said, "The HumanMarkup effort is poised to test its
applicability in military languages if efforts to solicit the
development of such applications are successful, because this is an
issue of survival within the context of people trying to kill you/us,
and for various efforts, HumanMarkup needs as many minds working on it
as it can attract, especially including the military."
Part 4 will say, "Some of the motivation behind the efforts
described in Part 3 for the sake of survival is to demonstrate that
HumanMarkup is not an idealistic fantasy but an essential tool, and
key among applications HumanMarkup will serve for the sake of
survival are Diplomatic Communications and Cultural
Descriptions."
In particular, we want to shed light on what we see as the crux of the
many crises that the Human Race must face, Cultural Conflicts.
This is an area as wide as all of Human History, as deep as all of the
Philosophies Humankind has produced, as varied as all the languages in
which Humanity has communicated, and if we attempted to address the
entirety of factors contained within the rubric of culture, we would
never be able to produce the work we are attempting.
However, we are considerably more pragmatic than that. As mentioned
previously in this series, we want representatives from Humanity's
various cultures to create the cultural modules from which they
spring.
It is important that they should have been raised within those
cultures if at all possible yet to have studied cultural anthropology
in a context at least somewhat removed from their cultures. We think
it requires that level of understanding to do a competent job of
describing one's culture.
That is to say that we need an intimate knowledge of the culture from
the inside out tempered by the study of cultural anthropology outside
of that culture so as to prevent the inculcation of that culture's
values within the study of cultural anthropology itself. This is
necessary for the development of methodology for study and description
of culture from a viewpoint that is as near as possible unbiased. We
think it is from that standpoint turned to a study and description of
the individual's culture that the most useful and accurate
descriptions and insights will flow. Using knowledge that can only be
attained from intimate knowledge gained by living and growing up
within the culture, such individuals can provide the information we
all need for better understanding.
This may prove to be a larger set of qualifications than we can
attract in individuals in the near future, and we recognize that
initial work may be necessary from cultural anthropologists who do not
meet these criteria. However, because we recognize this, we will do
our best to enable the cultural modules that we develop to evolve over
time as better resources become available. One of the more promising
arenas where we may be able to attract interest is in the academic
community, where the field of working on such cultural modules would
seem to be ripe for harvesting by graduate students for master's
theses and doctoral dissertations.
Far from being a pipe dream, HumanMarkup is aimed at rock-bottom,
down-to-earth, pragmatic solutions to problems of life and death.
HumanMarkup has no delusions of grandeur even though the scope of its
work is worse than merely grandiose, it defies description. Yet,
because we realize that those immensely larger issues are simply not
approachable, we have no intention of harnessing our best efforts to
fruitless pursuits. We break those over large issues into smaller,
addressable portions with which we can deal effectively. However, we
need more help and we need it now. We are a fledgling effort,
literally a yearling, but we believe we have demonstrated an approach
that can bite off manageable, achievable tasks that can be
accomplished in a fairly mundane, even prosaic, methodology of
collecting, refining, and standardizing vocabularies from established
realms of human study and providing those voacbularies in a form which
can be used to create applications to improve
communications.
There is no panacea in any of that. There is a helluva lot of work,
and, maybe, just maybe, some hope.
Thanks for your attention.
Ciao,
Rex
--
Rex Brooks
GeoAddress: 1361-A Addison, Berkeley, CA, 94702 USA, Earth
W3Address: http://www.starbourne.com
Email: rexb@starbourne.com
Tel: 510-849-2309
Fax: By Request
[Date Prev]
| [Thread Prev]
| [Thread Next]
| [Date Next]
--
[Date Index]
| [Thread Index]
| [Elist Home]
Powered by eList eXpress LLC