Fw: AN OPEN LETTER ...

[Wanda Thacker]

Yes, That's The Ticket!! I knew I had been there before, but I couldn't find my way back. Thanks, Will.

BTW if anyone else has any generally helpful sites up, I wouldn't mind at all if you posted them.
The other day someone suggested using live search and looking under books. Until then, I didn't know live search had books. I frequent google books, though. Electronic Scotland is good for Scotch history too. http://www.electricscotland.com/ I have found nice info on the ancient rulers there. I wish there were similar sites for French/Norman (my favorite subject to research is Merovingian and Carolingian Genealogy) and some of the other European
countries online.

Wanda Thacker

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- Henry Van Dyke, 1852 - 1933


Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn't people feel asfree to delight in whatever sunlight remains to them?
- Rose FitzgeraldKennedy, 1890 - 1995


Be as a bird perched on a frail branch that she feelsbending beneath her, still she sings away all the same,knowing she has wings.
- Victor Hugo, 1802 - 1885


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----- Original Message ----
From: wjhonson <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Sent: Friday, December 14, 2007 7:24:38 PM
Subject: Re: AN OPEN LETTER ...


On Dec 14, 4:10 pm, Wanda Thacker <[email protected]> wrote:

Mr. Johnson,

Would you be greatly offended if I told you that I had lost track of
where you have your data online and asked if you could give me a link?

I am pretty sure you have it elsewhere besides in the archives of
this group. I have so many bookmarks saved that I can't seem to run
across it. It is truly admirable that you try to share your information, as
it is for anyone else on this list who does. It has not been so very
long ago that people were very possessive of their work in genealogy and
very slow to figure out that if they lost by giving it away for free,
they also gained in what others shared in return.

Wanda Thacker

---------------------

Thanks Wanda I appreciate your message.

If you mean my Sources page that's here
http://www.countyhistorian.com/cecilweb ... hp/Sources

Some of my work is here at http://www.countyhistorian.com which is a
wiki that I own
The list of all pages can be viewed here
http://www.countyhistorian.com/cecilweb ... l:Allpages

There are some misc. bits and pieces of older biographies, etc that
I've worked on here on my free Rootsweb pages
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com ... Index.html

And more of my Rootsweb stuff here
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~wjhonson/

And here on the WorldConnect project
137,000 + names
http://awt.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?db=wjhonson

19,000 + names
http://awt.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?db=wjroyals

49,000 + names
http://awt.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?db=wjfranklin

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[Hickory]

I have also long wished for a really good late Roman Empire, post-
empire Germanic Kingdon, Merovingian genealogical website that would
not only provide properly documented information on provable
genealogical connections (distinguishing carefully between primary and
secondary sources and noting which is which), but which would also
provide enough biographical detail from primary sources to act as a
simple prosography of the subset of individuals being covered by the
period concerned. It would not only be a plus for serious genealogical
study, but also would have applications across a wide range of
historical research fields.

Any really good study for the period concerned would not only require
a need for a good understanding of medieval Latin (and, to a rather
lesser extent, the Greek of the early Byzantine period and very
occasionally with reference to Arabic sources), but would require a
thorough familiarity with the paleographical history of the period
concerned, as well as a knowledge of numismatics, art history, and
early medieval legal systems (canon law, Roman civil law both pre-
Justinian and post-Justinian, and the common law of the various
Germanic tribes which invaded the late Roman Empire). There are
excellent scholars at work in each of the fields I have mentioned,
but, unfortunately, no consortium of scholars that I know of at work,
which means it will be an indefinite number of years yet before it
will even become possible to clearly identify for this period which
genealogical questions are capable of being answered and which are
not. Basically, the biggest weakness one encounters (and this, in the
course of my own career, I have found applies to all areas of
scholarship) is that so few scholars are good at collaboration and, in
spite of elaborate bibliographies, rarely actually do in-depth study
of the work of any wide range of scholars in languages other than
their own, a fact which often reduces one to either keep on
perpetuating the myths of past scholarship, which often seem to take
on lives of their own, or to perpetually keep on re-inventing the
wheel, which, being more difficult, is rather less often done.

One needn't have a Ph.D. in any of the fields outlined above to
produce scholarship of a high quality. All that would really be needed
would be a first class coordinator of a web group with a clearly
defined purpose (e.g., rigorously documented Merovingian era
genealogy) who would provide a format for determining the areas of
expertise and possible biases affecting the research being done and of
which no one is completely free of. Also, there would be a need to
distinguish between contributors whose contributions would remain
anonymous to all except the site coordinator and other website users,
making it impossible for the non-contributors to comment serious
scholarship into useless obscurity as so often happens elsewhere.
Among contributors, there would be a need for an anonymous editing
ability of each other's work (and, more importantly, a group-wide
ability to judge whether the proposed editing was justified), but also
there would need to be an easily accessible archive of edited portions
of text and an easily verifiable means of determining who was
responsible for what. Finally, courtesy should be rigorously enforced.
The more scholarly a person becomes, the more a person very often
becomes intolerant of views other than his/her own. If intolerance
were to erupt into bad manners, as is so often seen at all levels and
in all venues of the world of research, there should also be a means
of cutting a person off from group participation.

I've noticed recently that Google seems to have on offer many, if not
all, of the web resources I have mentioned above. Perhaps you might
consider setting up a more narrowly focused research group along the
lines I suggested to tackle the issues you have mentioned. If you did,
I would be happy to participate, and would gladly contribute what I
could when I could, which would not be that much, but could, on
occasion be useful.

Hikaru

[Nathaniel Taylor]

In article
<fa25b1cf-5529-4c83-a605-dad1571addaf@p69g2000hsa.googlegroups.com>,
Hickory <[email protected]> wrote about his ideas for a collaborative database / discussion group
covering late Antique / early medieval genealogy....

There have been calls for collectively moderated databases / discussion
lists on specific focus areas in medieval genealogy before--this has
been discussed here since 1995 and in other fora before that. What we
have seen in practice is a number of individual efforts with varying
degrees of quality, which have never yet really blossomed into
self-sustaining collaborative works. It's not that real "scholarly"
people are unwilling to work together, or unwilling to participate in a
closed medium, but simply that no critical conjunction of interest,
skills (both in genealogy and in database management), and time
committment has yet emerged. And no consensus as to the best model has
been reached--even by those who have expertise, and who have discussed
these ideas both enthusiastically and dispassionately.

Don Stone, in particular, has in the past written a detailed model for
such a contributory database; Joe Edwards proposed a different model
when the 'Foundation for Medieval Genealogy' was launched a couple years
ago. Some projections for such a project have emphasized an open
contributory model; others have focused on a more traditional academic
approach, with an editorial board either vetting data or moderating
discourse or both.

Stewart Baldwin's 'Henry Project' is the best product of the closed
model we have yet seen: the contributions are almost entirely by Stewart
himself (with a few specific contributions credited to some of the best
contributors here), but Stewart is the sole editor and the database is
his product. The ancestors of Henry II of England represent an
arbitrary slice of the northwestern European upper nobility in the
9th-12th centuries, but this is a valuable effort both for its excellent
collection and discussion of primary sources on those people, and as
testimony that such a project--even if the collaboration hasn't happened
at the rate Stewart expected--is possible and valuable: it is a good
database which actually does improve upon its sources, rather than just
constituting yet another level of derivative data. For many of those
whom it covers it is preferable to *anything* in print (though I imagine
some secondary works, e.g. Settipani's _Prehistoire des Capetiens_ do
present a fuller historiography of genealogical scholarship for certain
individuals, or present more non-genealogically-probative biographical
information).

BTW it is at:

http://sbaldw.home.mindspring.com/hproject/henry.htm

Hikaru also wrote:

... The more scholarly a person becomes, the more a person very often
becomes intolerant of views other than his/her own. ...

I would caution that (even if this generalization were true, which I
doubt) it should NOT be used in converse and in the particular, to gauge
a person's level of scholarship by his or her intolerance or snarkiness!
We see plenty of people here who appear intolerant of dissenting
interpretation, unwilling to admit mistakes, ready to apply fallacious
logic--especially ad hominem--in discussion, etc. I think that people
who do this fall into two groups: some are very seriously overestimating
their own level of experience and skill and exhibit bad behavior out of
a mistaken impression that that is what scholarship is (these people
aren't scholarly, so can't fit the predictor). The other group are more
self-aware, but for whatever reason are so insecure that to boost their
own reputation and attempt to belittle others, they are willing to
consciously sabotage useful discourse. This latter group can be present
at all levels of scholarship, but I suspect are more evident in the
middle of the spectrum rather than at the top).

Wasn't there a study that showed something like "the more you know, the
more you know how little you know"? If one can extend this to "...and
the more you are OK with that," then I would say that more intolerance
and snarkiness is found at lower and middle ranks of scholarship than
among real experts.

Nat Taylor
http://www.nltaylor.net

[Douglas Richardson]

On Dec 15, 11:28 am, Nathaniel Taylor <[email protected]> wrote:
<
< I would caution that (even if this generalization were true, which I
< doubt) it should NOT be used in converse and in the particular, to
gauge
< a person's level of scholarship by his or her intolerance or
snarkiness!
< We see plenty of people here who appear intolerant of dissenting
< interpretation, unwilling to admit mistakes, ready to apply
fallacious
< logic--especially ad hominem--in discussion, etc. I think that
people
< who do this fall into two groups: some are very seriously
overestimating
< their own level of experience and skill and exhibit bad behavior out
of
< a mistaken impression that that is what scholarship is (these people
< aren't scholarly, so can't fit the predictor). The other group are
more
< self-aware, but for whatever reason are so insecure that to boost
their
< own reputation and attempt to belittle others, they are willing to
< consciously sabotage useful discourse. This latter group can be
present
< at all levels of scholarship, but I suspect are more evident in the
< middle of the spectrum rather than at the top).

There is also a third group here on the newsgroup who are intellectual
snobs. They like to think they're above it all. They like to analyze
the behavior of others, while contributing little or nothing
themselves. But, in truth, they put their pants on one leg at a time
just like the rest of us.

Best always, Douglas Richardson, Salt Lake City, Utah

[Nathaniel Taylor]

In article
<[email protected]>,
Douglas Richardson <[email protected]> wrote:

On Dec 15, 11:28 am, Nathaniel Taylor <[email protected]> wrote:

I would caution that (even if this generalization were true, which I
doubt) it should NOT be used in converse and in the particular, to
gauge
a person's level of scholarship by his or her intolerance or
snarkiness!
We see plenty of people here who appear intolerant of dissenting
interpretation, unwilling to admit mistakes, ready to apply
fallacious
logic--especially ad hominem--in discussion, etc. I think that
people
who do this fall into two groups: some are very seriously
overestimating
their own level of experience and skill and exhibit bad behavior out
of
a mistaken impression that that is what scholarship is (these people
aren't scholarly, so can't fit the predictor). The other group are
more
self-aware, but for whatever reason are so insecure that to boost
their
own reputation and attempt to belittle others, they are willing to
consciously sabotage useful discourse. This latter group can be
present
at all levels of scholarship, but I suspect are more evident in the
middle of the spectrum rather than at the top).

There is also a third group here on the newsgroup who are intellectual
snobs. They like to think they're above it all. They like to analyze
the behavior of others, while contributing little or nothing
themselves.

Assuming such a group of participants exists, your description of the
group's behavior doesn't correspond to the behavior mentioned in
Hikaru's generalization, so it does not belong with the two groups I
described. One could generalize about plenty of other groups of posters
who do not exhibit the behavior in Hikaru's statement.

Therefore it seems as if you misunderstood the argument of this passage,
Douglas. Or perhaps you did not misunderstand it, but shot off a snark
whose logical inconsistency with the passage to which you replied was of
no concern to you. Interestingly, this could be consistent with either
of the two models I described above.

I've read a lot of your posts, Douglas, and I'm honestly not sure which
model fits you. Would you care to self-assess?

Nat Taylor
http://www.nltaylor.net