Re: web resource and terminology

On Mon, 28 Sep 2015, Ivan Herman wrote:

> Another term that did come up during the discussion is "aggregated";
> maybe that term is better than "collated". I just checked in Merriam Webster, and this terms does not suggest ordering, so I am happy to
> change that if people agree.

On 28 Sep 2015, at 01:45 , Matt Garrish <matt.garrish@bell.net> wrote:
>
>  I just hate nuances

I'm the person who brought up the original issue, and I'm happy with any term that reinforces intention (see footnote [1] below before you take issue with "intention").

I'm not convinced that "aggregated" has enough of an implication of intention, And following on what Matt said about hating Nuance, it would be more straightforward to just go directly back to the original word, using something like "intentionally collected" or "intentionally gathered". But people took issue with that, and honestly, I agree with Ivan that we are spending far too much time arguing about the unsolvable problem of English-language semantics,[2] and not enough time moving on to more important work, so I will be happy with aggregated, intentionally gathered, curated, collated, or honestly any term that explicitly or implicitly connotes some form of intention.

Deborah

[1] "Intention" not necessarily meaning that a person sat down and said "these are all part of the same thing, forming a publication!" The following things can also be intention:

a. A web spider that gathers a particular subset of web resources based on some criteria.
b. A tool which allows a user to tag a particular set of resources and funnel them into a single pane of an RSS reader.
c. An online periodical which presents every submitted article timestamped "August 2015" as "our August issue".

Intent can be that of the reader. Intent can be that of the programmer who created the aggregation software. Intent can be that of the business manager who purchased automatic aggregation software. Intent does not have to happen at the point of production, but can happen at multiple points along the way: before content creation, during content creation, editorially after content creation, after content push to the public, etc.

By intent I simply mean "not a random collection of random stuff defined by running rand()" and grabbing random links. (Unless your job is to build a random data set for some reason, in which case, sure, there's intent there.)

[2] A TV episode  of a sitcom I watched last night featured a police public relations department which had spent 3 months focused hundred percent on discussing what to name the police public relations mascot penguin. Only funny because it is so true. I hope we do not spend 3 months naming the penguin. If we do I nominate Ivan to wear the penguin suit.

Received on Monday, 28 September 2015 13:43:03 UTC