aesmael

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

A while back the folks at LibraryThing started an Open Shelves Classification project (OSC, which makes me think of Orson Scott Card whenever I read it). There was even a round of beta testing in which LibraryThing members were invited to try and sort books into top level categories, to see how well the system was working.

Recently I have been spending more time at LibraryThing and Musicbrainz, having decided that 'now' is the time to ensure my collections are properly catalogued. I got curious about the state of the OSC project, having not heard much about it since the beginning of the year, so for the past couple of days I have been reading the Build the Open Shelves Classification group. I started from the bottom of the page and have been reading upward, trying to build a sense of context. So far I am still early on, reading the discussion threads on the initial round of testing that was the last I heard of the project and getting a bit frustrated with what I see going on in it although I do not know how things have progressed since.

The project as I understand it is to build a system for shelving works which is open source and easily usable by most for finding things, and to overcome the shortcomings of existing shelving systems. It is supposed to be a system for deciding how to organise material in a physical space and not some sort of abstract classification or cataloguing system, yet because this involves arranging things according to what they are deemed to most be 'about' I think it cannot help touching upon those territories.

My frustration comes from things like this: after reading several threads discussing matters like dividing items by audience (e.g. Children's, Young Adult), language, or format (e.g. prose, play, DVD) and what appeared to be a consensus that optional facets should be used, so a library that wanted to separate by format would be able to do so while one that did not wish to do so was not required to if they followed the system. So it was frustrating to then see in the first round of testing Comics & Graphic Novels as its own top-level category. This was precisely the situation that apparent consensus on optional facets was seemed suited for handling, and there seemed no clear consensus on whether graphic works should be separated out or interfiled. It seemed a lot like a crisis of disorganisation, although I suspect whatever was done with graphic works there would have been some sort of panic since they can include both fiction and non-fiction.

There were also some complaints that science was granted a single top-level category, while what are often called the social sciences (and other areas) were spread around. Despite initially being reserved about that, it does make sense to me since there are plenty of works about science generally, although I don't know this isn't true for other areas that were split up, and a place elsewhere could presumably be found elsewhere for them (philosophy->science ?).

The point was made at the start, which I agree with, that a shelf-organising project like this is foredoomed to failure somewhere as soon as it begins. Compromises will have to be made somewhere, there will be some number of works which don't fit easily into one category and not others, and how people sort the world is going to be culturally biased. The goal is to create a system which maximises ease of browsing, but I think even if the terms and codes can be translated themselves, it may in the end be better to create a new shelving system from almost scratch for different cultures than attempt to be human-universal.

What all these misgivings did accomplish was getting me to consider how I would go about devising a shelving system. So now you get to see my thoughts on that unless you are quick enough to scroll or close the page in time. As I said just a paragraph above, I think any such system is going to have significant points of failure, especially concerning multidisciplinary works or syntheses, and I have little idea if my thoughts on the matter would be any better or worse at avoiding such. Probably worse, since I have conducted no study to inform myself on the subject (I don't think my minor library qualification counts, since we were taught to use catalogues, not judge them).

So, top-level categories in my personal 'this seems like a good idea to me' system:

Reference

This is something I think of as not really a subject area itself, but a shelving area which is handy to have. I think of 'reference' as a sort of mini-library containing works which are useful to have readily available for referring to. Important to have in most cases, but should be handled by whoever is organising the library it occurs in. That, I suppose is to an extent bowing to 'how people are accustomed to finding things organised' and maybe it would be better to do without a reference section? Maybe in some ways it is better suited to a personal library, where the person who owns it can decide which books ey finds useful to keep in arm's reach.

Knowledge and ideas

I don't know what to call this category, but my idea behind it is 'knowledge about things'. If you want to know how something works, this is the appropriate section. Subsections include things like astronomy, psychology, mechanical engineering, history, religion, law. To a fair degree it approximates what we refer to as 'non fiction', but is not equivalent to that category. I am uncertain if it would be appropriate to separate 'how to' into a separate category, but for consistency with my ideas elsewhere, have not attempted to do so.

Games, sports and recreation

This includes subjects like cricket, World of Warcraft, whist or Dungeons & Dragons. Activities performed for leisure, for entertainment, or competitively. I suspect this is also a place for guides and (non-academic) information on practical activities like cooking, caring for pets, gardening, or sex.

Creative and critical works

This includes subjects like painting, poetry, sculpture, music, essays, films and prose fiction. Criticism, analysis and instructive materials go along with the works they are about. I think biographical works go here, since the material is not necessarily 'fiction', but I could see a case for it going with history in the knowledge section.

That's it. That's the whole listing of my current ideas on how I would organise a shelving and classifying system. My own if no one else's.

I was also talking with Tess about how to solve the 'one location per book' problem, so perhaps there will be a post later with (probably very impractical) ideas on that.

Today has been the Transgender Day of Remembrance. Likely not still that day here, by the time I finish writing this, but it will be elsewhere still. That day set aside for remembering all the people who over the past and previous years were murdered because of cissexist bigotry, for being trans.

The numbers for this year were a bit tricky to access, being in a Word document, but according to the website this year 101 163 people were killed for that particular who they are. If trend from past years hold true (and what I have read elsewhere indicates this is so), the majority of those murdered were trans women of colour. Not white trans women, and not trans men. A lot of the time trans people who are murdered are assumed and portrayed as having been sex workers, whether they were or not, and because of the widespread stigma applied to sex workers this provides cis authorities further disincentives to take these crimes seriously.

A lot of the time people guilty of these murders, if they are charged, use what is called the 'trans panic' defence. Rather than claiming innocence they instead claim the murder of trans people is justified because of how horrifying and disgusting they find it to be knowing a trans person. This gets accepted as valid in court far too readily, even though it is often untrue or very unlikely to be true that the murder was unaware of the person ey killed being trans prior to the act of killing. It tends, rather, to be that "I found out she was trans so I killed her[1]" is seen by many as a fair and logical train of thought. Even people who say the murder was wrong often say the murdered trans person was also wrong not to walk around wearing a sign saying "Trans", as if that would have made eir life so much easier to live, or would be a reasonable standard to require of someone so as not to be murdered.

[1] Actually they don't normally use gendered pronouns. Normally they describe the person they killed as 'it'.

I was thinking, for writing something for this day, about why these murders happen and why they are predominantly of women. The conclusion I came to was a combination of transphobia, homophobia and sexism.

The mere act of being visibly a woman, presenting as female, is seen by many men as a sexual act. An invitation. This is why a lot of men feel entitled to behave aggressively sexual toward women who are not welcoming of this behaviour - because being a woman is itself considered a sexual invitation or come-on.

It is because of transphobia that the genders of trans people are regarded as invalid where the genders of cis people are treated as real. Thus, trans women are considered 'really men' and trans men are considered 'really women'.

When we combine this with cultural homophobia and macho sexism that sees violence as a valid, even imperative means for men to enforce perceptions of their masculinity and 'defend' it from the threat supposedly posed by the existence of queer people and other ways of doing gender, well...

Because a woman in public is by default seen as engaging sexually with all the men around her, whether she wants to or not, and because a trans woman recognised as a trans woman is seen as being 'really a man', the mere existence of trans women is seen as a threat to the sexuality and identity of heterosexual cis men, one to which violence is often regarded as a justifiable or at least understandable response.

Of course this does not explain why white women are less likely to be murdered in this way than other women because my thought process did not include race until after the fact. I have seen however several other writers express that the lives of women of colour are regarded as less valuable than the lives of white women, just as the lives of trans women are regarded as less valuable than the lives of cis women which I can readily believe. It would make sense that the intersection of these two identities would combine to a far higher murder rate as people might believe either they could especially get away with the killing of a trans woman of colour, or that trans women of colour are especially unworthy of life.

Clearly, this needs to change.

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

I like writing stories. You like reading stories. Do you like my stories enough to keep reading them?

This is not intended as a personal question. The 'I' is generic, so is the you.

Automated story generation. It is an idea I first picked up from 1984, where stories were mass-produced by machines to keep the proles sedated. Since about then I've considered such story generation a plausible, likely sort of eventuality. Included it in some stories no one yet has read. I don't see why there couldn't such production of stories unless we turn out to be living in a dualist or otherwise supernatural sort of universe.

Typically I see it as a bit of a personally bleak prospect. Writers as a set of humans obsoleted by an equivalent or superior source of fiction. Today I wondered about parochialism, and maybe for some time people would prefer stories written by humans because of the sort of prejudices that lead them to say only humans can make stories worth reading, humans have creativity, humans have something ineffable that sets them apart. Maybe some would like reading the stories of those they knew or liked. I wonder in such a scenario how likely it is human authors would still develop a following.

*meaning here stories made by (nonhumans made by humans to some degree of antecedence)

This was originally composed as a response to a guest post at Questioning Transphobia:

Lately I am increasingly inclined to be critical of 'empathy' as applied to autistic and neurotypical* people. We might say autistic people lack empathy because they often do not have an intuitive understanding of people different from themselves, thoughts, feelings, motivations and actions. But then, it seems to me neurotypical people display an equal lack of empathy toward autistic people - they say autistic people do things for no reason, are 'mysteries', are 'unable to relate'.

So I suspect neurotypical people are not actually more empathetic than autistic people, but most people are like them and so they have a lot of opportunities to be accurate in attributing motive, feeling, desire, etc. who operate largely similarly to themselves. But they also happen to be the majority, or at least are in power and presented as default, so 'empathy' becomes 'ability to relate to and understand me'.

Actually, given the way people are treated across borders of culture, identity, physiology, am inclined to question whether empathy as it is claimed to be is much expressed at all.


*here used to mean 'not autistic', despite my interpretation of neurodiversity as being broader than merely autism; such an interpretation unfortunately leaves me without the clear and easy way to express this which neurotypical originally provided.

It's a funny thing being an immigrant. If you get a job you are awful for taking jobs away from fine, upstanding members of [nationality], but if you have no job you are a worthless drain on welfare sucking the system dry. If you are a person of colour you do not even have to be an immigrant.

The first story was about the horrible, 'shocking' treatment people sometimes receive, such as a woman left to die on a hospital floor, a man who was hit-and-run and then ignored laying on the road in a daylit New York street, or the boy who was tipped out of his wheelchair and ordered to stand up to be searched.

As soon as I saw the segment advertised I made a bet with myself, that the people - person, since I only saw the first example advertised beforehand - would be white, and perhaps a member of some other socially sympathetic class. Because this sort of thing happens all the time and seeing it spoken about made me wonder what about this case was getting it airtime?

Far as I could tell I was right, all three individuals appeared (from grainy video footage) to be white. The first two were I believe classed as elderly, the last a teenaged or young adult male in a wheelchair, sets of person generally classed as helpless and to be pitied.

Point is cynicism about what it takes for media to notice a problem, and even so still regarded as isolated shocking incidents and how could this happen in the United States? My whole life I have seen problems talked about and people ask 'How could this happen here, in this nation of wonderfulness?' (and in case you are wondering, I mean Australia too and probably several other nations) and while I suppose many people find this nationalistic ethnocentrism charming and perhaps even spurring-to-action, it gets rather tiring seeing such things portrayed as shocking, surprising when they go on happening all the time and are not really very hidden and oh goodness the people involved generally have to be some form of acceptably pitiable to even be noticed.



The second story, the first words I heard were from a video interview: "At what point do you stop defending paedophiles?"

I imagine most people can tell this is a rather loaded question in the present society. As far as I could tell, the matter in question involved a man who had served fourteen years in prison for child sex abuse, had after release been accused of abusing a young girl and, I surmise, this story had been prompted by his recent release from prison relating to that matter.

I make this supposition because the man being interviewed pointed out that the man in question had served out his previous prison sentence, had in fact been in prison two and a half years for the more recent matter of the girl despite not having been convicted for it, and that the girl in question had in fact fingered someone else as the guilty party (presumably a factor in his release).

At this point the host interrupted to say "But he has a track record." Which apparently trumps such trivial details as evidence and who the victim accuses and whether he has actually been convicted for the crime in question. This hysteria troubles me, in the way people who have served their sentences are not then permitted to live their lives after, and convicted in public sentiment forever after. See this case, where based on what I heard it seemed the host was insisting this man must somehow be punished, be held in prison, be prevented from living his life despite the matter having been looked into legally and his having been released rather than convicted of it and there being someone else accused of the crime.

( As stated in comments, I posted before I had finished my thought and its expression. New post later, but leaving this up )

Conclusion: annoyed.

I despise arguments for acceptance on the basis that the person concerned holds no choice in being who they are. Common examples being homosexuality and, at the moment, transsexuality. Specifically the discussion - arguments - concerning people who see being transsexual as a birth defect, that their body and brain sex are mismatched and all they need is to have their bodies modified so they can live as normative members of society.

The problem is, such appeals work because it is currently possible to cosmetically alter the rest of the body to match the person's claimed brain sex and it is not currently possible to alter the brain so it conforms to the body.

I do not believe this will always be the case. If, in the future, it becomes possible to alter a person's gender (or sexuality) "I can't help it" will no longer be a tenable excuse. If you wish to have the freedom to live your life as you would prefer, you will have to find a new argument. One that will persuade the greater public it is wrong to deny you this freedom, or right to allow it.

To say people should be accepted on the basis of their not having a choice about who they are - to say "this trait is inborn and cannot be altered, and therefore you should not discriminate against me because of it" - implicitly suggests that people who cannot make the same claim are less deserving of acceptance and that someone who does have a choice should choose otherwise. If this argument is the condition on which people allow your existence, then as soon as it does become possible you will be expected to make the choice to become acceptable.

If you have a medical condition, then as technology improves you will be expected to be fully cured.

Cross-posted: aesmael, genderqueer, transfeminism, transgender

    Since the election is coming up so quickly now (no faster than ever before, and as we approach summer, slower, in fact, in truth [though not significantly]), I will concentrate first on those parties running candidates in the electorate where I will be voting, in reverse order of my current opinion of them. Afterward, I mean to finish with any parties I may have missed.
    Therefore, our next target: Christian Democratic Party.

    Their policies page. I covered them only briefly once before. This time I will focus on their federal policies. It is just the one long page, so no need for frequent linking this time.

( Follow behind the cut! )
    And that is it. The rest details their positions for the 2004 campaign.

    In summary, this is the party which means to establish Christian primacy in Australia by

• Disallowing Muslim immigration for a decade
• Placing chaplains in all schools
• Smearing the good name of gay men and lesbians by associating them with child abuse
• Continue to block same-gender marriage
• Encourage children to believe it is wrong and dangerous to be anything but heterosexual
• End safe sex education
• Ban abortion
• Enforce the Sabbath
• Ban pornography
• Filter the internet
• Repeal anti-discrimination laws
• I'm sure I missed something

    I advise that no one vote for this party, and hope they break up soon.