Re: ComicSeries publisher/imprint

Hi Owen,
  In essence, your two types are what the GCD fields do today- "indicia publisher" (which should have been named something like "formal publisher" or "legal publisher" or "publisher of record") handles #2 and 3 (not all of which are technically subsidiaries, but close enough) and "brand" handles 1 and 4.  The GCD divides the "brand" concept into "brand group", i.e. a common name such as "DC" or "Vertigo", and "brand emblem", which is the visible marker of a brand- possibly more than one brand.  The "brand group" concept is the one that maps relatively intuitively to the casual use of the term "brand".

And yeah, all of your points about the difficult situations in general over time, and the likelihood of exact data capture actually mattering in most cases are well taken :-)  We've encountered all of the cases you mention at the GCD.  If you want to go completely nuts, try to sort out how to track the early history of Image.

I'm not quite sure what it means for something to be "publisher or imprint".  Usually something is one or the other in a given usage (with the possibility that the publisher and imprint happen to be named the same thing, and the possibility that there is no imprint).  If you just mean that anything in that field may, at some other time, be the other sort of thing, yeah, that has to happen.

The "on behalf of" thing has come up at the GCD.  Actually, part of the early Image mess involves something like that.  And during World War II, publishers who were not otherwise involved in comics but who had sufficient paper allocations would publish content supplied by other actual publishers.  For instance, it doesn't make any sense to group all of the Wm. H. Wise comics publications together- you need to look at who supplied the contents, as they should generally be considered the "real" publisher (there is a special flag in the GCD schema for this situation).

Another wrinkle in early US comics is the prominence of packaging studios, who might supply contents on a story-by-story basis, or might supply the entire interior of the comic, or might actually supply the whole thing cover to cover.  And might also operate as a publisher at the same time.  There are a bunch of things lumped under Harry "A" Chesler, for instance, where we'll probably never entirely understand exactly what was going on (packaging client, wartime surrogate, direct publication, or some other thing).

I've drifted off point, but yeah, this gets arbitrarily complicated.  The GCD has endorsed a project to specifically track these things more or less independent of specific usage (which was mostly directed at me, but I haven't had time to work on the idea yet).

thanks,
-henry


>________________________________
> From: Owen Stephens <owen@ostephens.com>
>To: Henry Andrews <hha1@cornell.edu> 
>Cc: "public-schemabibex@w3c.org" <public-schemabibex@w3c.org> 
>Sent: Monday, December 9, 2013 1:09 AM
>Subject: Re: ComicSeries publisher/imprint
> 
>
>
>I've not got a huge amount to add to this, but from the academic journal publishing side I think the picture is pretty similar. Imprint is definitely separate from 'publisher' in this case. I'd probably broadly boil your four definitions of Imprint down to two in this case:
>
>
>* Brand (encompasses your 1 and 4)
>* Subsidiaries (your 2 and 3)
>
>
>Anyway - I think the thrust is very similar.
>
>
>As you indicate the area is fraught with problems, but for me the biggest issue is that the data publishers and consumers are unlikely to cleanly differentiate (or often care?) about the differences - and as sometimes the same label may apply as first a publisher (independent publisher) then as a Subsidiary (publisher bought out by another company) and finally a Brand (purchasing company absorb business but keep absorbed publisher name as an brand type imprint).
>
>
>The complexity of publisher/imprint relationships (especially once taken over time) and the fact that many data publishers and consumers are unlikely to make the distinction clearly makes me feel that any 'publisher' field needs to be read as 'publisher or imprint' from both sides. Where a string is used it can be taken as either publisher or imprint. Where a URL is used potentially there can be more information available behind it (and I can imagine this is an area where schema.org isn't going to be what is needed to describe the underlying complexity).
>
>
>Just to through in one other complication in academic publishing sometimes titles are 'published on behalf of' - especially with "Learned Societies" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_society) who often commission publishers to publish titles on their behalf. This isn't an imprint, it is an additional relationship but one that can be confused with the 'publisher'. In cases where such an arrangement is in place the user is often interested in the learned society responsible for the journal rather than the publisher (especially as Learned Socieities may decide to commission an alternative publisher at any point)
>
>
>Owen
>
>
>Owen StephensOwen Stephens Consulting
>Web: http://www.ostephens.com
>Email: owen@ostephens.com
>Telephone: 0121 288 6936
>
>On 9 Dec 2013, at 07:41, Henry Andrews <hha1@cornell.edu> wrote:
>
>Hi folks,
>>  Here is the promised separate thread on publishers and imprints.  This is an area of particular interest for me in terms of historical research, so I'm probably going overboard for these purposes.  But just in case it's useful, here are some thoughts.
>>
>>
>>Most of this boils down to whether you're trying to define clear guidelines for uniformly managing the data (which the GCD is trying to do) or providing generally useful fields and allowing different users to tailor the exact usage to their own needs (which perhaps is closer to what y'all are doing).
>>
>>
>>Imprint appears to be the only publisher data being stored, although I see publisher fields in the examples at the PeriodicalVolume/ComicSeries level.  If there isn't a publisher field, is the imprint intended to link to some sort of publisher object that contains various imprints? (which can be a complex many-to-many relationship, or involve otherwise identical imprints in multiple places.
>>
>>
>>Assuming its separate from "publisher", what definition of "imprint" is intended?  Roughly speaking, there are four:
>>
>>
>>* "real" imprint, meaning some business entity has said "this thing here is an imprint"
>>
>>
>>* subsidiary company, often because one publisher bought another, but the bought company continues doing business as itself.  Sometimes treated as a full publisher.
>>
>>
>>* shell companies, i.e. the 80 or so companies Martin Goodman shuffled around from his pulp days through when he sold Marvel: http://www.comics.org/publisher/78/indicia_publishers/  In cases where we don't know as much as we do about Goodman's companies, shell companies may be treated as full publishers because we have no idea to whom they belonged.
>>
>>
>>* "branding" for lack of a better term- something buyers identify due to emblems of some sort (logo or tagline) but that may or may not correlate with any of the above.  The GCD just implemented a more useful way of organizing this info and the DC data is in pretty good shape: http://www.comics.org/publisher/54/brands/ (click on a brand to see the associated emblems).
>>
>>
>>Now I'm certain you aren't trying to track details like brand emblems, but it's a tricky question as to what you expect people to put in that field, or in the publisher field if you have one.  Here's an example:  Captain America Comics #1 (March 1941): http://www.comics.org/issue/1313/
>>
>>
>>Most people, who probably know Cap from the recent movies, would expect this to be published by Marvel.  If imprint is the only field available, they'd probably expect it to say Marvel.  However, it doesn't say "Marvel" *anywhere*.   it has absolutely no brand emblem whatsoever (Goodman used them only rarely, and with different names, until about 1949).  The indicia lists the publisher as Timely Publications, which is at least a name commonly associated with pre-Marvel comics in the 40s by comics historians.  But that's all you've got in terms of objective data on the comic.
>>
>>
>>And that's just issue #1.  Next issue is Timely Comics, Inc. for a while, then Complete Photo Story Corp. for most of the run, with the last few published by Marjean Magazine Corp.  Most have no branding, but variations on Timely, Atlas and Marvel appear sporadically.  None of those companies or logos are "imprints" in the modern sense (like, for instance, Vertigo is an imprint of DC, although the publishing company is usually whatever DC is calling itself at the time).
>>
>>
>>Anyway, I can go on about this sort of thing at length, with a broad range of examples, and that's just in the US.  The GCD currently uses four fields for publication data and its still not really sufficient, but it gets down to precision and data quality.  And also use cases.
>>
>>
>>The GCD is concerned about authoritatively recording data in a central location.  If the schema is just so various people can use a standard format for a range of purposes, it probably doesn't matter too much whether these fields match "correctly".  People dealing with modern comics will use pretty intuitive notions of "publisher" and "imprint" which probably have more to do with logos and common usage than the publishing company.
>>
>>
>>Historians trying to use this will probably go nuts making the data fit, but that's probably inevitable no matter the fields available (speaking from experience :-)
>>
>>
>>cheers,
>>-henry
>
>
>