Re: [humanmarkup-comment] Base Schema-culture

[James Landrum <James.Landrum@ndsu.nodak.edu>]

Title: Re: [humanmarkup-comment] Base Schema-culture

What Rex proposes is good, useful, and workable.. What follows are several
related issues, e.g., whether we should approach this as "element = culture
(noun)" or "element = cultural (adjective)" with element qualifiers e.g.,
that stipulate grammatical (grammarical?) usage/application of terms, and
whether (or not) we should address the disicplinary contexts that apply in
usage and definition. 


for example: 
element = culture (noun)
qualifier = shared beliefs
qualifier = values
qualifier = customs
qualifier = behaviors
qualifier = artifacts
qualifier = material culture (see below)

element = cultural (adjective)
qualifier =  beliefs as in cultural beliefs
 qualifier = values  as in cultural values
 qualifier = customs as in cultural customs
 qualifier = behaviors as in cultural behaviors
 qualifier = artifacts as in cultural artifacts
qualifier = heritage as in cultural heritage


element = society (noun)
element - societal (adjective)
element = association (noun)
element = community (noun)
element = group (noun)

and so forth...


This gets deeper (thicker or denser) the further one explores the issues
imbued in definitions of culture. I address the disciplinary venues (contexts)
in application of the terminology, and for now I would limit these to 3 disciplinary
contexts that impinge on humanmarkup language. We have been addressing #1,
Anthropological context, thus far:

1.Anthropological context

element = culture (noun)
 qualifier = shared beliefs
 qualifier = values
 qualifier = customs
 qualifier = behaviors
qualifier = artifacts
 qualifier - material culture Note also that the term "material culture"
refers to culture-specific material culture assemblages, e.g., Samoan Material
Culture, and in the archaeological  literature this is also presented as
"material culture remains" in reference to artifacts)

 element = cultural (adjective)
 qualifier =  beliefs as in cultural beliefs
  qualifier = values  as in cultural values
  qualifier = customs as in cultural customs
  qualifier = behaviors as in cultural behaviors
  qualifier = artifacts as in cultural artifacts 
 qualifier = heritage as in cultural heritage

2. Sociological
element = culture (noun) (similar to anthropological baove)

3. Biological
element = culture (noun)  (much different than Anthropological and Sociological
above), as in use of auger to cultivate a biological (e.g., bacteriological
or virulogical)) culture.

now, regarding "artifact" and "artifacts" definitions, disciplinary venue
and context are at issue, whether one is referring to what some museologists
(museum professionals), librarians, and archivists,and some (few) archaeologists 
refer to as:

 "a 3-dimensional (3-d) physical object of human manufacture or modified
by humans."  

but "artifact" is more generally defined by archaeologists as

"an object of human manufacture or an object modified by humans"
  note also the comment above, repeated here:  (Note 1:  Note also that the
term "material culture" refers to culture-specific material culture assemblages
of artifacts, e.g., Samoan Material Culture, and in the archaeological  literature
this is also presented as "material culture remains" in reference to artifacts
.)

Note 2: In this context I apply "object" rather than 3-d or 3 diomensional
because we are now in the digital age and, for example- in the case of our
lab, we create 3D (note the missing hyphen and capitalization of letter "D"
in "3D") digital models (surrogates) of actual artifacts, and I would prefer
that we do not place ourselves in a semantic argument circumstance that will
arise if we apply (what is my mind view the incorrect application of the)
terms "3-d" or "3-D" term used by museologists, librarians, and archivists
[Note: I have had some minor discussions with folk at CIMI, NINCH, SAA, and
other organizations trying to resolve this particular issue; it is as yet
unresolved.)

or what in the behaviorists' context is (loosely) defined as

 "a sign or symbol (linguistic or physical), physical action (e.g., gesture),
behavior (e.g., avoidance ritual)" ( etc.- behaviorism is not my field, so
definition is "loosely" presented and so working definition should come from
that sector)"



Rex Brooks wrote:

Well, Here I am, replying to my own posts again, but be that as it may, I have gone through the resources that James recommended, at least to a cursory extent. I usually leave the research to everyone to do on their own, but, because culture is such an important concept for HumanML, I'm going to get down into the trenches a bit here.

This is from http://www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/anthropology/courses/122/modul e1/culture.html

Although there is no standard definition of culture, most alternatives incorporate the Boasian postulates as in the case of Bates and Plog's offering, which we shall

accept as a working version:

       Culture: The system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviours, and artifacts that the members of society use to cope with their world and
       with one another, and that are transmitted from generation to generation through learning (p7).

This is a complex definition and points to four important characteristics stressed by cultural relativists:

     1.symbolic composition, http://www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/anthropology/courses/122/modul e1/culture.html
     2.systematic patterning, http://www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/anthropology/courses/122/modul e1/patterning.html
     3.learned transmission, http://www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/anthropology/courses/122/modul e1/learned.html

     4.societal grounding, http://www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/anthropology/courses/122/modul e1/social.html

I'm including it along with the following because together they are fairly thorough, and I think we may want to consider the combined totality, with the links connected to the numbered items above, as a good standard for the more widely used meaning for culture.

The following is from http://www.siu.edu/~ekachai/culture.html

CULTURE: SOME DEFINITIONS

According to Samovar and Porter (1994), culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies,
religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of
generations through individual and group striving.

Gudykunst and Kim (1992) see culture as the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people.

Other definitions:

       Culture is communication, communication is culture. (Edward T. Hall)
       Culture in its broadest sense is cultivated behavior; that is the totality of a person's learned, accumulated experience which is socially transmitted, or more
       briefly, behavior through social learning.
       A culture is a way of life of a group of people--the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and
       that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next.
       Culture is symbolic communication. Some of its symbols include a group's skills, knowledge, attitudes, values, and motives. The meanings of the
       symbols are learned and deliberately perpetuated in a society through its institutions.
       Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of
       human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values;
       culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other hand, as conditioning influences upon further action.
       Culture is the sum of total of the learned behavior of a group of people that are generally considered to be the tradition of that people and are transmitted
       from generation to generation.

I think that this combination covers the main characteristics of the term culture as widely used today.

I am hoping to hear more from those on our lists about whether they think, as I do, that we need an atomistic huml:-prefixed description of the element culture that narrowly defines it such that our secondary schemata for various cultural entities/modules can be easily compiled according to an enumeration of characteristics without the necessity for creating a new specific definition for each culture, yet still maintaining the useability of the wider, unprefixed term, culture in other contexts.

And, of course, I am waiting to hear more from Len and Sylvia about how this fits into the semiotic framework.

Ciao,

Rex

At 1:03 PM -0700 8/11/02, Rex Brooks wrote:

This is the address of the Schema which you can download:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/humanmarkup/files/Technical/XML.Schema /XML.Schema/

This is also a link to this url on the OASIS Humanmarkup TC website under the documents section.

We are striving to ensure that our vocabularies harmonize with the most widely accepted schools of thought for various topic areas.. The Yahoo site remains from our pre-OASIS period, called Phase 0 in the OASIS TC website. We have a fairly extensive webliography there (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/humanmarkup) in the General Info directory in the files section from that period, which included 6 months of discussion and research before we applied to and was accepted by OASIS.

Thanks for the AAT url, I have looked at it and it appears very useful.

I think the time has come for me to devote some time to reorganizing our material. Actually, I have had it scheduled for August since April, so it is more a matter of getting down to it. I have just a wee bit more work to do on my generic VRML/X3D Basic Human Models to make them ready to include in our discussions as we proceed onward to finalizing our Base Schema and seeing what develops from the semiotic experiment Len and Sylvia are working on. If you missed my announcement a couple of weeks ago, I have worked out a kind of skeleton for the facial musculature to go along with the ISO standard for Humanoid Animation as part of the VRML97 standard for inclusion in the next version which has already advanced to a single mesh from a collection of body part segments. This will allow us to agree upon kinesic bodily gestures and facial expressions to accompany our work. You can see an animated gif and download an .avi of the same sequence showing how the facial animation works: http://www.starbourne.com/X3D.html

Then I will have no excuse not to proceed with the reorganization which I have targetted to have done by late August early September.

Ciao,

Rex

At 1:05 PM -0500 8/11/02, James.Landrum wrote:

Thanks for the clarifications Rex.
I must admit I have been out of touch with a number of Humanmarkup activities and the comments of late, and am admittedly a newbie in this initiative, and seem to have somehow lost sense of the thread on the issues, and would appreciate some direction.
..  Particularly, I am having difficulty locating the strawman toolkit referred to in previous posts. I will take some time today reviewing that if pointed at it.

Also, with regard for structured vocabularies and source origins for terminology, the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) may be a useful resource for consideration of choice of definitions of terms applied in Humanmarkup, at least insofar as the TC deems appropriate or applicable within constraint of context.

see http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabulary/aat/
for example, enter keyword "culture" and then try "artifact",
Note also, for further example, that the AAT does not have base definition of "community"

Note also that a number of markup language initiatives, particularly those in the cultural heritage sector, cite AAT as an authoritative structured vocabulary (among others).

Rex Brooks wrote:

Thanks, James, I will review the material in the URLs and I am sure it will be helpful. I must admit that I was so immersed in the semiotics of the article and the resources it led to in turn, that I did not make it clear that the restriction was meant to be the most atomistic definition. I agree with you that it was a definition not description--description is the terminology of xml schema. This illustrates what may be the necessity for distinguishing between a strict huml-prefixed-namespace definition of certain terms and the more broad, and widely used definitions. I'm not saying that we need this, only that we may. By "interpreter" I was meaning semiote as defined by Sylvia Candelaria deRam previously, and I'm afraid that even in my own mind I was overlapping the semiotic experiment with the more focused discussion of the element: culture from the straw man schema. Also, and I admit that I was wrong headed in this, I was laying out the foundation for specifying particular cultures along the lines we had noodled out a little more than a year ago which would involve a hierarchy of attributes like geographical location, historical context, etc. Since our aim is to reduce miscommunication, here is a good example. I look forward to reviewing the material. I expect we will be at work on this term for a little while. This is one of the most important elements, so we need to get this one pinned down as accurately as we can. Thanks, again,Rex At 11:51 AM -0500 8/11/02, James.Landrum wrote:

A condensed definition of culture, which may perhaps be more easily be transposed into the boolean:

"Culture is shared knowledge."

In the above definition of culture, "experience" is implied, as are "behavior" and "actor."

(Note: "Interpreter", as in Rex's definition (what he calls a description) "culture is the community of interpreters that shares the same sum of experience,"  is too restrictive. No 2 people interpret in exactly the same way, as their individual sum of experiences are not identical, despite being part of a community; one can experience cultural manifestations without strictly interpreting them, or can misinterpret the manifestation. Salience is an issue here- e.g., meaningful interpretation of culture, or cultural behavior, implies insider knowledge. In the above definition, "shared knowledge" implies the ability to communicate meaningfully, that is to say, if one cannot transmit information meaningfully, crucial, or core, cultural  knowledge is not shared.  The crux of the latter point is that if there is miscommunication, cultural knowledge is not understood appropriately, if at all, and although there may be misinterpretation or miscommunication in the process of information exchange, sharing does occur- and that is culture in process).

review the following URLs for discussions on baseline definitions of culture:

Baseline Definition of Culture (WSU)
http://www.wsu.edu:8001/vcwsu/commons/topics/culture/culture-definit ion.html

A Definition of Culture (U. Manitoba)

http://www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/anthropology/courses/122/modu le1/culture.html

Definition of Culture (Slippery Rock University)

http://www.sru.edu/depts/artsci/ges/discover/d-4-1.htm
"Culture: The learned patterns of thought and behavior characteristic of a population or society."

Marshall Soules' "Toward a Definition of Culture" (Malaspina CC)

http://www.mala.bc.ca/~soules/media112/culture.htm

Culture: Some Definitions (Southern Illinois University)

http://www.siu.edu/~ekachai/culture.html

 

-- 

Rex Brooks
Starbourne Communications Design
1361-A Addison, Berkeley, CA 94702 *510-849-2309
http://www.starbourne.com * rexb@starbourne.com

-- 
From the Desk of James E. Landrum III
Database Manager
Archaeology Technologies Laboratory (ATL; http://atl.ndsu.edu)
Digital Archive Network for Anthropology (DANA; http://atl.ndsu.edu/archive)
North Dakota State University, Fargo, North Dakota 58105
Ph: 701-231-6434
FAX: 701-231-1047
email: james.landrum@ndsu.nodak.edu