From: dagoura@MIT.EDU
Message-Id: <9310140151.AA12803@m16-034-14.MIT.EDU>
To: mitgaard@MIT.EDU
Subject: The Great Name Project
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 93 21:51:30 EDT


Greetings, all from Tibicen!

At the meeting today I discussed with a bunch of people a Great Name
Project.  The point of the project would be to create lists of good
period names (and their documentation) from which new (and not-so-new)
Scadians could choose names, assured of those names' authenticity
(i.e. know that they really were period names).

A lot of people seemed interested, so I said I'd email the preliminary
info and plan here.  If you think you'd like to help with the Great
Name Project, read on....

First off, the idea will be to do this on Athena.  We'll have a
directory in the SCA account to store all this stuff.  Anyone will be
able to look at and read what's in that directory, but all working
staff will be given the appropriate write permissions.  We will be
able to make all the subdirectories we need, too.

The basic idea I had for going about this is, everyone grabs a book
about period that looks likely.  It could be specifically about names
or people, or maybe it's about some aspect of period in which you're
interested.  Now, as you read your book, you record all the names you
come across, and all the relevant data.  You could do this on
pre-printed blanks you type up later, or right at the terminal.  The
trick, of course, is to choose good books.

Following is my proposal for how to do entries.  It seemed to me that
the best way to do this would be to have a file for a given
region/time, and just keep appending new entries - one line each - to
the end of the file.

****************Entries:

Name	[pronunciations]	<F or M>	::	(date)	<f. or r.>	::	author	title	page	publisher	city	date	<language if not English>	::	blurb

Where -

	Name == the name
	[pronunciation] == [best guess of pronunciation, if you have one]
	<F or M> == Female or Male
	(date) == (date name is known to exist to)
	{region} == place name comes from
	<f. or r> == Fictional or Real 
	author, etc == standard bibliographical info
	<language if not English> == language in which source is written
	blurb == what text has to say about person who had the name

	And ALL fields are separated only by TABS.  ONLY USE SPACES
	BETWEEN NAME ELEMENTS AND IN THE TEXT OF THE BIBLIOG. AND BLURB.

An example would be:

Azalais	[AZ-ah-lahEESS]	F	::	(1200^1300)	{Provence,
France}	r.	::	???	Women Troubadors	pg. 23	Penguin	NY	1988	::	Was one of a hand full of women Troubadors (singer-composers) we know about.

Yes, it looks ikky.  It looks somewhat better if you resize your emacs
window to be Really big.  But this has the benefit of being
platform-independent - i.e. we can work on this from any machine
without any really special software, and if/when we do come up with
database software to wrap around our data, it will be easily portable.

The other thing is that in this system, you must make sure to include
all the fields - even when they are empty.  This means sticking in
"????" or just leaving them blank and making sure to hit tab twice.
This is part of what the "::"'s are for - they will help vastly in
finding entry errors during importing.  If you want the gruesome
details, let me know and I'll explain it.

Please feel free to suggest better ways of doing this! 
*****************

So, if you think you'd be interested in doing this, send me email, and
we'll start to work on it.

Tibicen
dagoura@athena