Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!ncar!tank!tank.uchicago.edu!mitchell From: mitchell@tartarus.uchicago.edu (Mitchell Marks) Newsgroups: news.groups Subject: Re: hum.* vs rec.arts.* and rec.music.* Message-ID: Date: 19 Feb 90 19:46:43 GMT References: <1990Feb14.230808.4556@cs.rochester.edu> <92S14F1xds13@ficc.uu.net> <637@dino.cs.iastate.edu> Sender: news@tank.uchicago.edu Organization: University of Chicago Computer Science Lines: 87 In-reply-to: mehl@cs.iastate.edu's message of 16 Feb 90 08:22:28 GMT >>>>> In article <637@dino.cs.iastate.edu>, mehl@cs.iastate.edu (Mark >>>>> M Mehl) writes: mehl> Perhaps I'm missing something here, but I think I just heard someone mehl> suggest moving the soc.* hierarchy into a hum.soc.* hierarchy. Is mehl> this the intended meaning? (Please note, I'm "not" saying this is a mehl> bad idea; I just want to get some clarification on what's being mehl> proposed when someone mentions hum.* as a new hierarchy.) mehl> As I see it, we are talking about creating a hum.soc.* and a mehl> hum.arts.* on Usenet. Is this correct? I hope not. There actually seem to be several different proposals, none of them spelled out in exquisite detail yet (nor should they be, yet). I'll try to clarify here what I take to be involved in one line of these proposals. The starting point (the "whereas" clause) is the observation, or claim, that "sci" seems to be functioning as the one top-level node where people expect to find newsgroups whose contents will in significant part be serious, professional or semi-professional, maybe quasi-academic discussions and presentations in fairly well-defined disciplines that in many cases correspond to academic subjects. [Of course "comp" has its own special status.] Some sort of cognitive tension arises when the subject fits that description but is not that clearly scientific -- while remaining clearly not recreational, computational, socializing, concerned with the operation of the news network, or miscellaneous. So where does such a group go? [The issue comes up in particular when representatives of one school of thought are asking for a newsgroup which under this description might go under "sci", and opponents say "Your approach is not scientific". Of course I'm talking about the sci.philosophy.objectivism flap.] The proposals (in one line of though) suggest that these quasi-academic groups should fit into the hierarchy in roughly the way academic subjects are divided into "divisions" or "faculties" in a (generic) university. Thus: -- Scientific subjects, both biological and physical, remain where they are. [Variant proposals would create "bio" or even separate "bio" and "med" top-level nodes.] -- Subjects traditionally in the humanities would go under a newly-created "hum" top-level category. This might well include all *.philosophy.* groups, even those dealing largely in technical matters such as mathematical logic. It would also include SOME but not all of the current rec.arts.* groups; these would have to be decided on a case-by-case basis. It would NOT include the traditional "social sciences", such as economics, psychology, anthropology, sociology. History is a toss-up. -- Subjects traditionally thought of as falling in the social sciences would go into the "soc" hierarchy. Thus, for example, sci.econ becomes soc.econ. These groups are then sharing "soc" with existing groups, which show a variety of concerns, purposes, and degrees of formality. In part this means peaceful coexistence, and in part a re-conceptualization of some groups (soc.women/men, soc.culture.*) as having been all-along-after-all forums for interdisciplinary social science, somewhere in the psychology/sociology/anthropology orbit. I emphasize that this is just one way of characterizing the proposal. There are a lot of disagreements with specifics of this, and it's hard to say which are variants within the same general scheme and which are entirely rival proposals. But, at a guess, the following seems to be the main point of one major alternative: [ALTERNATIVE] Do not attempt to distinguish humanities and social sciences. Think of them as "the human sciences", and give them just one top-level node. This might be called "hum" as in the main proposal above, or "huma", or "hss" [for "humanities and social sciences"]. I won't here get into arguments between the two main proposals. Do participants in the discussion think this was a reasonably fair summary of what's being proposed? [Apart from my device of calling one "the main proposal" and the other "an alternative proposal".] -- Mitch Marks mitchell@cs.UChicago.EDU My uncle is sick, but the road is green.