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"Distribuida por Etnoarquitectura.com" es la sección de Etnoarq
que presenta apuntes sobre lo que ocurre al interior del sitio, del trabajo,
y de la vida del promotor de este proyecto. En otras palabras, este es
el "blog" o
bitácora del sitio, e informa cuando se añade nuevo contenido,
cuando hay cambios técnicos, o cuando ocurren cosas personales y profesionales
que valga la pena compartir.
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An update about the database
8/30/2006
One of the main issues to solve when working on Ethnoarch's database of vernacular types has been what criterion to use for organizing the data. This has been indeed one of the aspects I have spent more time thinking about. Given that there is so much material on the topic, only listing it would produce a rather chaotic list, a huge list that wouldn't make much sense in the end. Looking for options, I explored several feasible ways to arrange that list (among them use, amount of info available, environment, materials, structural system, and twelve more). My decision, at least until the winter 2005, was to organize the database around the most comprehensive of these options, which I thought was use (domestic, ritual, defense, etc), and have a number of secondary lists showing the data organized by each of the remaining criteria.
Working in that direction, during the winter break I prepared a preliminary launch of the database, having the data organized by amount of info available, listing first what types have images and most of the info, then which ones have info but not images, which ones have no info at all, etc. (Choosing "use" at that point would have demanded to enter a lot of data in order to make the work understandable, and I didn't want to spend the little time I had available just entering data). Anyway, I got to have the templates ready and just needed to "polish" a bit the info entered on some types, before making it public.
But the spring semester came, I had to stop the work, and chance brought me back to anthropology. I registered for a class with Professor Nader and not only her passion about the anthropology practice but also the reading of historically key ethnographies revitalized the appreciation that I have for that area of knowledge. In the middle of the academic madness I kept thinking about this project and how critical is the decision of how to organize the information. It became very clear for me that the project needed to be very well structured before starting to add data and, moreover, before opening it for online users to add data, as modifying it on the way would be very complicated, if possible at all.
Through the anthropology class I thought again about an idea that some researchers defend, which is that this phenomenon I am dealing with is actually two phenomena, one being "vernacular" or "urban" or "global" and the other "traditional," or "indigenous", or "ethno." In other words, there is mobile architecture everywhere around the world, but there is only one specific form of mobile architecture called "tambo" in a specific area, that being the Upper Amazon. If I tackle only one of these two phenomena at the time, the process of structuring the database would become much simpler. In other words, if I think about the specific manifestations of the phenomenon first, listing the architecture of specific areas ("indigenous architecture"), then it would be much easier to list the general architecture of the world as a general phenomenon ("vernacular architecture") and link it to those specific manifestations. So the final decision was to drop "use" as the main organizational criteria and choose instead "group" as the main one.
So, the thinking went on, if I list all the existing ethnic groups (by "ethnic" meaning "cultures") in the world, then it would be easy, when users want to enter a type in the database, to assign the type to the group or groups it can be associated to. Then visitors would be able to browse the database by groups, by the countries these groups belong to, and by the types belonging to those countries, among other possibilities.
But, how to get a comprehensive list of "peoples of the world"? There actually exist those lists, notably compiled by religious-inspired organizations with an impressive level of detail. Some of them have even been made publicly available for research and educational use.
There was still a problem, however. No list of cultures can ever be exact, because cultures are entities that change so fast and so constantly that it would be very difficult to say when a culture stops being one and becomes a different one, changing, merging, or simply disappearing. Making a list of cultures implies unavoidably some level of freezing the culture in a stage, and that sort of freezing the others, of creating stereotypes out of them, is an outdated practice that this project in part aims to respond to, at least in what it concerns to architecture.
So, I thought about languages. With languages it is different, because there seem to exist more clear, "scientific" indicators of when a language changes, disappears, becomes a new one, or is absorbed by another one. So this project can indeed talk about "groups," but this should refer to language groups, rather than to cultural/ethnic groups. The next question would be: can one equate language to culture? That question doesn't seem to have a simple answer, but certainly until some point one could relate both.
So, final decision, I opted to relate architectural types to one of the most extensive lists of languages of the word, that of the Ethnologue, compiled by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) throughout more than 50 years of research. SIL lists 7,300 languages and something like 39,000 related dialects and language alternate names. Their publicly available list comes separated as three databases, one of languages, one of related names, and one of countries. Following SIL's invitation to "incorporate the supplied tables into your own database application" and with the valuable help of Noe who was visiting, the three databases were merged in one. That was not an easy job, because part of the merging work had to be done by hand. The result, however, was a quite solid database that connected every language group with all the names it is known or related to, the main country where it is spoken, and the other countries where it is also spoken. Other fields not in the original lists were also added. They included the architectural types common to each group, a general description of the group's architecture, the printed and electronic references available on its architecture, and several others.
That's done. What is taking longer, however, is to translate the database into Spanish, which is what I am doing in this moment. I'm interested in keeping this a bilingual project and that way keeping a bridge to my own "culture," whatever that means. In this moment, when I have stopped to write this (June 16), I am working on group number 4,045 or something, and still going through more than 3,000 more groups seems like an interminable labor. The summer is going incredibly fast, and I am also working on other "real work" (paid) projects. But I still hope that I can make the list public before the summer ends, and I have to stop again and resume school.
Acerca de este artículo
A note on the most decisive update work done so far on Ethnoarchitecture.com, the database of vernacular types. The database will actually start, as the entry explains, as a database of indigenous types, which will be in the end, as the entry also explains, actually a database of linguistic groups. Which brings us back to the old connection that the term vernacular has with language.
This note was written two and a half months ago, but I hadn't had time to upload it, precisely because of being immersed in the work of translation that the note mentions.
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Members of Kilivila, one of the groups to be featured on Ethnoarch's linguistic groups-indexed database.
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Imagen
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Fecha de Toma e Información
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October, 1915
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Code No. E06VIII24Malinowski-pl60
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Papua New Guinea - Trobriand Islands – Omarakana. People: “Armshells brought from Kitava.”
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