Nationalities graph

Here's a first cut at a "nationalities" graph.

ME: http://www.librarything.com/profile/timspalding/stats/nationality
You: http://www.librarything.com/profile/MEMBERNAME/stats/nationality



Things to note:

1. It's only using English CK.
2. It's using only the last CK entry. So if entry one is "Russia" and two is "USA," it uses only the second.
3. It lumps everything under 1.5% into "other"

On the latter, we have to choose either first or last. I think last makes the most sense.

The plan is to chart them on a map, not just as a pie. For that, we need to map country names to current Google country codes.

The map interface can only handle modern countries. Should we encourage people to add modern country designations to CK (ie., make Herodotus also a resident of Turkey), try to map them ourselves (ie., Rome -> Italy) or what? I'd favor people adding them into CK, since a Roman historian from Hispania should, I think, go under Spain not Italy.

UPDATE: To be clear, this data comes from the "Nationality" area on author pages. It's "Common Knowledge" data. You can change it. Do!

The plan is to chart them on a map

Marry me.

Where?

"England," "England, UK," and "UK" could stand to be combined somehow.

>3
Gibraltar.

Would we map that as Spain or the UK?

"England," "England, UK," and "UK" could stand to be combined somehow.

Does anyone have a pointer to discussion of this in the past? We should be using country names when appropriate. I'd argue the last CK entry should be a country, period. But saying that the Venerable Bede had "UK" nationality only strikes me a bit weird.

A map would be very cool! You might want to think about how to have some kind of consistency in naming the country beyond just the modern name. For example, my list shows 57 authors from the UK (including Agatha Christie, J.R.R. Tolkien, etc.) and a separate 18 from England, UK (Jane Austen, the Brontes, J.K. Rowling), when in reality they should either all be together or have separate designations for the Scottish authors, if any of them are.

Edited to add - >6 oh, you've already got that down. Cool.

Thanks Tim. I love all the new statistics.
Apologies if this has been discussed previously, but why are stats such as Male/Female and Nationalities based on the number of authors rather than the number of books? Personally i'd prefer the latter.

I think it would make sense to have a toggle. But let's figure out the hard questions first.

>4 Also, if the city/town/state is mentioned, it's considered separate from the country right now.

Right. It DOES say "Nationality," however. So unless your nationality is the Republic of Venice, I'm not sympathetic. There's a box for places of residence.

Someone comment on the substance of the discussion in #1? I need to decide how to do this!

#6: A country, yes, but a modern country? The Venerable Bede was a citizen of a Northumbria. But at least that's cleanly undisputedly part of the UK, and the same is true for the countries that have ruled that patch of land since then.

What about Alexander the Great? If we're going for modern countries, Macedonia or Greece? Or maybe Iraq, because that's where he died.

How about any number of Irish writers who lived and died in Ireland, UK?

Does this new feature bode well for my ancient request to show a map for the CK Important Places field?

A) The link back to here doesn't work.

B) I have authors listed under UK; United Kingdom; England, UK; England; Scotland; Wales; Jersey; Northern Ireland; Scotland, UK --all as separate countries. The data isn't organized very well.

I think the best one on my list is Abbasid Caliphate.

I had one listed as Confederate States of America as the second nationality. I flipped them.

I changed Sherwood Anderson to USA from Camden, Ohio, USA

I have on listed as "Turtle Mountain Chippewa" that I don't have the heart to change.

some put Friedrich Nietzsche as stateless.

Also, Soviet Union/USSR can't be automatically mapped to any modern nation. And what about John Papa Li, citizen of Hawaii? His nationality was not US, and he would have been aggressively offended at the concept that it was. What about Mexicans who lived in what is now California or Texas--possibly died fighting the US? Normalizing it is scary.

If you're just going to take the last, you'll need to specify which the last should be. I changed Isaac Asimov from US / Russia (birth) to Russia (birth) / US (citizenship), because he was an American who just happened to be born in the Soviet Union. Bobby Fisher's last one is Iceland; I left it alone, because that's at least chronological, even if he made history as an American.

>11 ? If that was in response to my comment, I meant pretty much what you're saying, I think - that a "residence" or whatever in Tennessee, the United States, shouldn't be separate from the rest of the United States on my list.

I would say regarding #1 that we should encourage people to add modern countries to the CK and have a way of encouraging a...hmm...consistent way of formatting the information so it shows up right on the map. I think having the modern country listed in the CK would be useful information anyway, especially for folks like me who are not so great at geography...

#1

On mutliple CK entries ... we have to choose either first or last. I think last makes the most sense.

I'm not so sure. If the first one is UK (Birth) and the second Canada (Permanent resident) which is better for nationality? Or course for each one of those there is probably one where the last is better for nationality. I don't think the data are robust enough for this to be anything more than a fun feature.

Also nationality isn't a mono-valued real world item. A number of people legitimately have dual-nationality.

I know alot of people think its a separate country but how would I fix this so it is USA and not its own country?

New York, New York, USA (1)
Melissa Marr

The plan is to chart them on a map, not just as a pie.

Awesome! Thanks, Tim. Glad to see the idea got some traction. (Even the pie is cool. The map will be awesome.)

22> Go to Melissa Marr's author page, scroll down to Nationality, and edit it so that only "USA" is in that line.

#20: For most people, there's probably a best nationality, but it may be debatable; for Vladimir Nabokov, who was born Russian, lived the last 15 years in his life in Europe, but chose and kept American citizenship, is his nationality USA? Is Bobby Fischer American--I'd argue even in exile, even in Iceland, he was an American through and through, but that's a personal judgment.

On mapping no-longer-extant countries: Can we make this work through parentheses and pipes? For example:
Republic of Geneva (in present-day Switzerland)
Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe)
Prussia (present-day Germany) -- or Prussia (present-day Poland) depending on the case?

Is there a way to have some kind of standard code for "currently in," that the system could parse?

How about this solution?

The map uses the last one only. It must be a country that exists today or they aren't mapped.

Another view shows all strings entered. So you can see everyone who was an Ottoman subject or whatever.

>26

I'd rather use the pipe for

Russia (birth)

We could also split the field into Nationality and Nationality (current country) or something. I'd rather not, though.

1> (ie., Rome -> Italy)

I looked at the authors who were marked "Rome" (14), and those who were marked "Roman Empire" (23), and flipped all the first to the second; that avoids the "Rome is a city in Italy, not a country" issues, and gets them all together.

Edited for typo

But not all Roman authors are of the Imperial Period. Indeed, most of the best aren't

#27: The map uses the last one only. It must be a country that exists today or they aren't mapped.

It solves some of the problems. On the other hand, some countries will get solid history (France, US) and other countries that have more complex histories (Russian Empire, Soviet Union), will leave a lot of authors out. Greece will get some ancient authors, but Italy won't get any of its.

I just changed L. L. Zamenhof from Poland to Russian Empire. He wasn't ethnically a Pole, Polish was about his third language, and he never lived in a unified Poland, so why label his nationality as Polish? But excluding that from the map is going to make that more controversial.

Referring to the UK/England thing, The full name is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Great Britain is the island that consists of the three countries England, Scotland and Wales - map Map

Britain refers to the group of islands including Great Britain, the Channel Islands, Hebrides, Isles of Man and Wight etc

So, Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh people are NOT English. British probably is the best correct nationality for all of the above.

Wow this euler diagram looks complicated, even for me and I'm British!

I think I'd prefer if you included all the nationalities that an author has entered. So if an author was born in Russia and became a US citizen both would count. To keep from overvaluing Russia and the US in your percentages you could count each for only half a person.

And I don't like the idea of polluting the Nationality data by saying that a Roman citizen born in Hispania was also a citizen of modern-day Spain. I don't really think there's a way to map an authors nationality that doesn't run into a lot of problems with the edge cases. Perhaps you should give up on that idea and try to map author birthplaces instead.

I love that you are working on this, and look forward to the map.

Mapping author's birthplaces makes the most sense to me, too.

The plan is to chart them on a map, not just as a pie.
Amazing, thank you!

33: I think I'd prefer if you included all the nationalities that an author has entered. So if an author was born in Russia and became a US citizen both would count.

Agree.

Okay, people aren't actually following what I'm saying. Urgh.

OK, here's what you said in msg #1, On the latter, we have to choose either first or last. I think last makes the most sense.

If those are the only two options I vote not to do this on nationality as the data is not good enough. Or if you must, just limit it to authors from modern countries. Just please don't add nationalities for authors that didn't even exist when they lived.

As the originator of this proposal, I must admit that my library is heavily skewed toward more recent authors, and the issue of ancient writers didn't occur to me. But I'm dismayed that people are using this as a reason to scuttle the whole idea. Can't we just not do the mapping for non-current countries?

One helpful thing about the current display is that it shows up typos easily. I have just edited a "Brithish" entry to "UK". I also changed two "Czech" to "Czechoslovakia" - problems for them if you are only going to include countries that still exist.

A minor point is the need to pull out the 'not a person' entries from 'not set' as happens with M/F and Dead or Alive.

>38 Can't we just not do the mapping for non-current countries?

Or, is it possible to map the superannuated countries in their correct place? That at least avoids the Athens v. Greece type of conflict or my Czechoslovakia difficulty in >39.

>1, On the latter, we have to choose either first or last. I think last makes the most sense.

I think that to the people who are doing the data entry on this/these fields, they are most likely to put the author's birthplace nationality first, as being most important. I just saw an entry where this was so, and the next two entries were for the two nationalities of her parents, which does not seem appropriate use of the field to me. Another likely pattern of data entry is chronological, where the birth nationality is first and the author's final choice is last; was this the the reason that you think that using the last makes the most sense, Tim?

Maybe I am over analyzing this, but using the term "nationality" I think is a huge problem. One issue is that we are all conflating ethnicity, citizenship, and nationality; hence the "she was born in Russia but lived in the US for 25 years" confusion. The first is ethnicity (or nationality), the second citizenship (if that person became a citizen of course). Furthermore, one can be part of a "nation" that does not have its own country.

I think the data would be cool to look at on a map, but the project needs some definitional clarity. If you just care about countries that people currently lived in, or countries from where people did most of their writing that is a completely different question than "what nationality is this person?" I'm sorry, but nation does not = state.

This is wonderful!! Thanks so much for this! :)

Are you able to 'combine' countries, because England is the same as England, UK (This is really bugging me because nobody puts Scotland, UK or Wales, UK but Englad is half with and half without) England Scotland and Wales are 3 different countries but UK refers to all three.

This looks like leading to huge edit wars if people don't agree on some basics. Take England, for example. The hint text specifies countries: England hasn't been a separate country since the first Act of Union in 1707, so either UK or England, UK is correct for anyone living after that. The England slice of the nationality pie should be reserved for Shakespeare and other non-UK English writers.

44: You forgot Northern Ireland.

Also somebody keep changing Enlgand Scotland and Wales to UK, wish they would stop, E, S and W are better than UK, they can be bracketed under UK later if tim wishes, but there are historical authors that were scottish and welsh before there was a UK! I'm too tired to deal with this

I think some sort of quasi-combination is what's needed, where "nationalities" can be combined into geographic country, where the latter is a location on a contemporary map. It doesn't sound easy, but it sounds doable, and most of the work would get taken care of in the early stages; maintenance would be light.

Of course, geographic country could just be an extra CK field, as Tim suggests in #1.

46, but I don't have any Northern Ireland, beacuse they keep putting Ireland for Eire and N. Ireland!!!!, and that's a whole problem on it's own!!!! because All of Ireland was UK between 17something and 1801!!!! I'm a going crazy!!!! can you tell!!! it's 1 am!!!!! aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhaaaaaaahhhhhhh!!!!

England, UK It keeps coming back and back and back, it's not england UK, it's just england!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!​!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!​

#47
England, Scotland and Wales may be better than the UK in your estimation, but the hint text seems to specify citizenship, as it gives birth and passport as the two examples. Like it or not, modern English writers have UK passports.

That's the way it was explained to me when I joined, and queried the number of Irish writers that were listed with UK as their nationality.

None of the scottish or Welsh writers get UK appended, and when you put England, Scotland or Wales the UK bit is implied/forgone, there isn't another england

Oh, I was wrong about Ireland, it was in the UK for ~100 years after 1801 not before, it's 1 am, that's my excuse.

Besides my UK passport says my nationality is British, it's under my name and above my birth date on the picture page.

I would totally put irish writers as Ireland, I'm having aproblem with Dunsany though becuase he was Anglo-Irish and I don't know what that means in terms of this yet

Besides my UK passport says my nationality is British, it's under my name and above my birth date on the picture page.

There would probably be less misunderstandings here if they had gone with the nationality adjective British, Irish, French etc., but they chose to use the country name, and by that you've got a UK passport. If there's general agreement that the UK should get special treatment, I'll be happy to go along with it.

But then again Tim Sevrin is an british citizen, born in india, so not English, Scottish, or Welsh but truly UK

#52: I would totally put irish writers as Ireland, I'm having aproblem with Dunsany though becuase he was Anglo-Irish and I don't know what that means in terms of this yet

The language they wrote in has nothing to do with their nationality. In Dunsany's case, he was born in London, lived in Dunsany Castle in Ireland, and volunteered for the local defense forces of Ireland and the UK in WWII. Presumably he has both UK and Ireland for nationalities.

I think you should just map the data that's readily interpretable in its current form, and not worry about the rest. It's not worth the complication. There are so many more important issues you could be thinking about.

I agree with 56.

Just please don't add nationalities for authors that didn't even exist when they lived.

I think this is bogus. Italy has every right to claim Dante and Machiavelli, although "Italy" didn't exist. Anyway, my point is that more answers are better than fewer, and that, if the last one is a modern country we can plot your authors on a map.

Or, is it possible to map the superannuated countries in their correct place?

I think that's too hard. I'd rather see all the countries that "claim" the author list. Also, while there's no "true" answer, I'd rather put Seneca, a Spanish-Roman author in Spain than assign him equally to Britain because that too was part of the Roman Empire.

Another likely pattern of data entry is chronological, where the birth nationality is first and the author's final choice is last; was this the the reason that you think that using the last makes the most sense, Tim?

I think so. But it's an average. Nabokov was an American Citizen, not a Russian.

Maybe I am over analyzing this, but using the term "nationality" I think is a huge problem

Yeah, we've had this discussion before. There are US/non-US shades here. But I think the uncertainty is largely solved by asking for the noun form. It's USA or France, not "French."

I think the data would be cool to look at on a map, but the project needs some definitional clarity.

Absolutely. We're trying to figure out how to make it interesting and fun. But this is an 80% solution.

Take England, for example. The hint text specifies countries: England hasn't been a separate country since the first Act of Union in 1707, so either UK or England, UK is correct for anyone living after that. The England slice of the nationality pie should be reserved for Shakespeare and other non-UK English writers.

My proposal is that people can enter as many answers as they want, but the FINAL one in the CK list should be real country today. England is not one today.

Also somebody keep changing Enlgand Scotland and Wales to UK, wish they would stop, E, S and W are better than UK, they can be bracketed under UK later if tim wishes, but there are historical authors that were scottish and welsh before there was a UK! I'm too tired to deal with this

They shouldn't change them. But they should add UK to the end of the CK list.

Final comment

I think I'm going to need to put my foot down and tell people the rules. This is a classic situation where someone needs to define a rule--not because rules are good but because data is FOR something, and in this case what it's for is very clear.

I think those rules are:

1. List as many countries as you want that apply.
2. List countries (ie., states) not ethnicities or etc.
3. The last item in the CK list should be a real country that exists today.

Anyone object, or shall I set this in stone?

I think you should just map the data that's readily interpretable in its current form, and not worry about the rest. It's not worth the complication. There are so many more important issues you could be thinking about.

Yes, it's not going to do anything fancy. We can perhaps deal with U.S.A. and USA being both mapped to the whatever Google uses, but we're not going to be mapping England to the Roman Empire based on dates...

Ugh. I really don't want to see modern day "nationalities" for Seneca, etc., even if it's the last in a list where the ones before it are more accurate. That's why I think putting present-day location in parentheses would be a better solution.

By the way, very cool feature. I'd love to be able to disaggregate it by collection or tag: as soon as I saw it, I wondered how my philosophy books compared to my novels.

>60 Yeah, I'd rather see parentheses, or else have a whole separate CK field for equivalent modern country.

#58: I'm happy with those rules. I've been tagging the last item with (modern day) if I have to map to a modern nation.

58>
1. List as many countries as you want that apply.
2. List countries (ie., states) not ethnicities or etc.
3. The last item in the CK list should be a real country that exists today

Oh, please do put it like this in the CK help text. It's much more clear than what's currently there, which gets too many demonyms. I think this is clear, and the bit about "countries, not ethnicities" is needed.

I think your ideas at the bottom of 58 are good but unless they show up in the CK help text, anybody that doesn't read this post won't know what the "rules" are.

I was going to just throw out the idea that perhaps 'birthplace' would be a better thing to map (ie place on a map), but then I checked and there is no CK for 'birthplace'. Some people have put '(birthplace)' after a location in the CK field 'Places of residence'.

Birthplace (where it can be determined) would map better because it can be translated to lat/long and mapped directly. It is a fixed location and doesn't change with the geo-political labels.

I love this idea, but I also have a confusion between nationality, ethnicity and citizenship. I always interpret nationality to be citizenship. It sounds as though others do not. Maybe we could change the labels on CK to make this clear, but I can see where that would lead to chaos with old data. Also, it is conceivable that one might know someone's residence without knowing their citizenship.

Nice new analysis of data. It needs some harder rules though. The whole England, UK thing is annoying - my largest group are UK so having a couple of outliers at England, UK (as well obviously as England and British for more historic authors - funnily my many Scottish authors are all just listed as UK) takes away from the neatness of the concept. Also Leon Trotsky is currently listed as Mexico while Ovid is apparently from Romania which suggests that the concept of nationality is not being universally defined.

Also and with apologies for double post - justjim's idea about birthplace is awesome.

I'm extremely happy with the rules!

...mainly because it means there's a slim chance you'll move onto one of my ponies, like maybe auto-alphabetizing title names coming from Overcat! I had such high hopes for that feature. ;)

#68: Tim's rules said that the last item should be a real country that exists today. Ovid lived the last part of his life in what is now Romania, so I put his nationality as Romania. Leon Trotsky is complex, but when he died, he was clearly not a Soviet national, and he died living in Mexico.

>71

My understanding was that whatever you would normally give as nationality for the person should be converted into a modern country and given as the last entry. It doesn't automatically have anything to do with the "last nationality" of the person.

#72: Tim specifically says that "a Roman historian from Hispania should, I think, go under Spain not Italy." So obviously we're not simply converting the original nationality into a modern country; we're giving a real country that exists today that they lived in.

1. It's only using English CK.

I've just checked my Nationality chart, and of course it's is not set for quite a few authors. Currently I'm using hu.librarything.com. Should I log into the English version of the site and set the CK nationality field there? Or maybe later non-English CK will be used?

#73: yes but it doesn't say anywhere it has to be the last place the person lived, just that the last entry on the list needs to be a modern place.

For example, a Roman historian from Venice who happened to die in Hispania woudn't get listed under Spain.

Listing Trotsky as Mexico seems to make little sense from any perspective.

>58
"I think this is bogus. Italy has every right to claim Dante and Machiavelli, although "Italy" didn't exist."

I can agree with that, but should Kant be considered German? Or Russian?

(edit after having read more closely)

#75

Yep for famous people you can use the Man on the Clapham Omnibus test. I believe he would say that Trotsky was Russian (and Bobby Fischer is American).

Obviously when you go for less well-known people (like most writers) there isn't enough widespread knowledge to use such a test.

There cannot be a hard and fast rule. For some people there truly isn't a good answer - Sonia Gandhi - Italian or Indian?

Finally with Britain you have some very complex issues.

British citizens don't have to be born in the UK or have lived there at any time. People from the IoM and the Channel Islands are British citizens but the IoM and the Channel Islands are British Crown Dependencies. British Dependent Territories citizens. It is possible to have BDTC / British dual citizenship. British Overseas citizens. This has changed in recent history - there used to be a law for protestant descendants of the Electress Sophia of Hanover (and it is possible that some of those can still claim British Overseas citizenship).

> 4 / 6: Do understand, but there was indeed an England before the UK (est. 1707), and there are also such things as Scotland, UK and Wales, UK (etc.).

I think - if I remeber correctly - that we reached some sort of consensus that we could use the multiple values for this field also to indicate that somebody could be from Italy (in the modern sense), but also from the Republic of Venice (in his/her contemporary state of things).

Is it appropriate to add a nationality for an institution? How about a collaboration where all parties have the same nationality?

#58
I think those rules are:

1. List as many countries as you want that apply.
2. List countries (ie., states) not ethnicities or etc.
3. The last item in the CK list should be a real country that exists today.

Fine by me.

Also somebody keep changing Enlgand Scotland and Wales to UK, wish they would stop, E, S and W are better than UK, they can be bracketed under UK later if tim wishes, but there are historical authors that were scottish and welsh before there was a UK! I'm too tired to deal with this

Tim: They shouldn't change them. But they should add UK to the end of the CK list.

So, people. Scotland, Wales, England, whatever, first, but UK as last entry. Can we all please stick to this to get rid of the England/UK problem?

Great idea!

I want to emphasize, as others have, that nationality does not equal citizenship, nor do all nations have states. This is contentious ground... fascinating stuff, but presumably we don't these discussions to hold up this exercise. The debate can be circumvented by going with Tim's suggestion that the rules specify only countries / sovereign states currently in existence can be listed. That will still leave a few contentious cases, but to my knowledge there aren't many LT authors from Western Sahara or Transnistria. :)

For this data to be really useful, we have to be able to exploit it to its fullest level of granularity. I admit to be primarily concerned with the UK question - I have zero interest in a UK appellation to authors but if we were to able to use their correct countries of nationality (and yes they ARE currently extant countries, by definition), then that would be an interesting analysis of my collection. What would be the point of users adding Scotland, Northern Ireland etc if the data then gets subsumed? It is always easier to combine data than to separate it out.

Although my collection is mainly non-fiction, the constituent countries have distinct literary traditions, and this would be lost to those who may be interested in that aspect.

To most people from these islands using UK as a label of nationality is about as useful as describing us as EU citizens. The fundamental questions are why are we doing this and what it telling us, and in the case of the UK, almost nothing.

Wouldn't it be fascinating to be able to compare this graph with a "birthplace" graph?

>83

See, this is where it gets confusing. If i understand correctly you're saying Scotland and Northern Ireland are countries. The word "country" doesn't have much significance in the social sciences, but in common usage it's generally considered a synonym for "state," i.e. a sovereign state. The UK is a state or country; Scotland, Northern Ireland, England, and Wales are not. They are most definitely nations (groups bound by geography, language, culture, history, and a common sense of identity); but together they form one sovereign state: the UK.

Having said that, i can see how a UK appellation may not have much use as far as literary tradition is concerned. That's a tricky one. Other stateless groups with a strong historical sense of nationhood and a rich literary tradition will have the same argument, and i'm not sure how it will or should shake out as far as this LT exercise is concerned. But i think we need to be clear on our definitions of nationality vs. citizenship, state vs. nation, etc. It might be helpful to refer to an outside source for a definition. Wish i could suggest one.

(Edited for spelling)

84 To most people from these islands using UK as a label of nationality is about as useful as describing us as EU citizens. The fundamental questions are why are we doing this and what it telling us, and in the case of the UK, almost nothing.

While it would be interesting to have that data as well (Scotland etc), I wouldn't want to sacrifice the use of UK to have it because, to me, it is meaningful. If UK nationality were to be broken down into England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, the graph wouldn't reflect the large number of authors a user has that share the same citizenship: British. By the way, notice how it's called the British nationality law, yet it decides who can be called a British citizen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_nationality_law

Quote: "British citizenship is the most common type of British nationality, and the only one that automatically carries a right of abode in the United Kingdom."

When people say nationality, more often than not, they mean citizenship. E.g. a Pakistani living in Germany would be a German national and Pakistani citizen, yet if you asked him what his nationality was he would probably say "Pakistani", not German.

However it would be great if Scotland, Wales etc would be statistically meaningful.
My graph now says: "UK (25.9%)"
It would be amazing if it said :
"UK 25.9% (Scotland ?%, Wales?%, England?%, N Ireland ?%)"

i.e. if it somehow recognized that the four are part of UK and not separate nationalities.

#81: Scotland/Wales/England/Northern Ireland, UK sounds good to me, even for those born before the 1707 Act of Union, the 16th century (when England and Wales were treated as one country) and before even the medieval period.

Also, this birthplace/residence/deathplace conumdrum could be simplified (though not necessarily solved) by individual author's preference, where known, being adhered to. Though, of course, the research involved is anything by simple, eg Raymond Chandler, who went from US citizen to British subject (not citizen, a different category) back to US citizenship: what is he classed as, and does it depend on what he wrote and when he wrote it?

#81: Scotland/Wales/England/Northern Ireland, UK sounds good to me

87: Just to make sure you understood msg 81 (that you were addressing) correctly - not add UK at the end of the line ( e.g. England, UK) but add it in a separate line, like thus:

-England
(add item)
-UK

I do wonder if it's possible to modify the algorithm (if that's what it is, I have no idea about programming) to recognize that E,W,S,NI are part of UK so we can keep both the UK statistic and the Scotland, Wales ones

Tim said in the first post:
The plan is to chart them on a map, not just as a pie. For that, we need to map country names to current Google country codes.

Do Google codes map to sovereign states?

would it be possible to make the designations:
England UK
Scotland UK
Wales UK
Northern Ireland UK

or maybe:
UK (England)
UK (Scotland)
UK (Wales)
UK (Northern Ireland)

If we can take a moment aside from squabbling about the best way to handle areas that are not currently sovereign states:

This isn't excluding or separating out authors who aren't individuals the way the gender graph does. (If you look at your "Not Set", they'll be listed there.) It is, I suppose, more plausible to associate a nationality with a group than to associate a gender -- i.e. the "National Geographic Society" could reasonably be listed under the US -- but does it make sense to do so, or should these be screened out?

I'm a Brit - an Englishman even - but I wonder if this isn't getting a bit too Anglocentric. As Noel Coward said - it's such a shame when the English claim the earth, they give rise to such hilarity and mirth. At least part of the reason that 'Engerland' does so badly in the soccer World Cup is the arrogant assumption that, because we invented the game, the UK should be allowed to field four teams, one from each of the home nations.

Pace Celtic sensitivities, we are all British Subjects or citizens of the United Kingdom & Northern Ireland or whatever, so why can't all our authors (and readers) be content with UK as nationality for these purposes? (I'd have preferred 'British', but that's a lost argument!)

FWIW, I think the rules in #58 are fine.

What about authors who are Basque or Native American or French Canadian? That is, what about people who live within the borders of a given sovereign state but do not identify with the nationality that "goes with" that state? I'm not talking about ethnicity, but the politics of national identification.

Also, I have in my library an author from Catalonia (Pere Calders). Catalonia is an autonomous community of the Kingdom of Spain. Therefore it's not a sovereign country in its own right, but it seems reductionistic to say that Calders is from Spain. Such a statement also does not accurately acknowledge centuries of Spanish political history.

Yes, there are other issues. Non-persons being one. Multiple authors sharing a common name but not necessarily a common nationality is another.

> 94

Multiple authors sharing a common name but not necessarily a common nationality is another.

That shouldn't be an issue since the data is drawn from CK, and no CK should be entered on pages with multiple authors having a common name. (I'm not saying that people don't do that, but they ought not to.)

94>

That shouldn't be an issue any more than it should be for the Dead/Alive issue; unless CK applies to every author on a shared page, it should not be filled in. (So gender frequently can be, in these cases, but not anything else.)

Exceptions exist, of course, for edge cases when one author is overwhelmingly dominant. But this really isn't an issue. The non-person thing may be, but it's been handled differently for the gender situation than it is here, hence my question.

>93
If in doubt, I say try to keep it simple. If you've got a Spanish passport, and you live within the borders of Spain, you're Spanish(ish), even if you identify as Basque or Catalan. Extra rows can be used to add further info.

>94
I've cavalierly assigned nationalities to a few institutions and collaborations (Led Zeppelin, Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music).

I feel less comfortable assigning them to multiple authors, but I've done it anyway (or at least where there's a clear "primary" author). This is mostly cos I think we may as well, partly in "protest" at what I think is the biggest glitch, data-wise on LT (i.e. lack of decent disambiguation).

ETA:
Ha! Already told off by in the previous two posts! So sue me - I think most or all already had at least some CK already.

> 97

This is mostly cos I think we may as well, partly in "protest" at what I think is the biggest glitch, data-wise on LT (i.e. lack of decent disambiguation).

I simply cannot fathom this reasoning. Basically, you are saying that because the data is not pristine, you are "protesting" by making it even worse. Exactly how is that helpful? If you want to screw with your own catalog's data, be my guest, but please don't deliberately do things that mess with everyone else's.

96> That shouldn't be an issue any more than it should be for the Dead/Alive issue; unless CK applies to every author on a shared page, it should not be filled in. (So gender frequently can be, in these cases, but not anything else.)

I, for one, don't agree that gender can or should be applied to a page with multiple people, even if individually they are all of the same gender.

>92 I think people feel that dividing it up makes it more informative because it's more specific. I also think that some people find the United Kingdom slightly confusing: "These places used to be separate countries, and then they unified, but there's always some people who want to take them apart again. And what do the people from these countries even think about it?" (Actually, that would be an interesting question: get a random sample of people from the four nations and ask them what nationality they consider themselves to be. Would more people from Scotland claim to be Scottish or British?)

Also, and this could just be an American thing, but people here in my part of the country don't think in terms of the United Kingdom. It's just not how they order the world. Popular conception dictates that in the British Isles, one has Scotland, Wales, England, and Ireland. Part of Ireland "belongs" to Ireland and part to England. Everything but Ireland (the Republic) is put together and called Great Britain. (But the terms "English" and "British" mean exactly the same thing). I know this is not terribly accurate or precise, but it's how the people I know make sense of it all. There's also a great many Americans of "UK" descent around here, and even though in most cases it's been at least 100 years since their ancestors immigrated, if you were to say, "Oh, so your ancestors were from the United Kingdom?" They'd say, "No, they were Scottish." (And then they'd look at you funny for even thinking that people from Scotland could be anything but Scottish.)

#95

"That shouldn't be an issue since the data is drawn from CK, and no CK should be entered on pages with multiple authors having a common name. (I'm not saying that people don't do that, but they ought not to.)"

The inability to enter data on so many authors IS the problem. What percentage of authors are lost in the multiple name mess? I imagine it is an impressive percentage.

100> Well, 100 years ago (or maybe 200, I'm unclear on the details) Scotland was a separate country from England. I have an ancestor who on his Census forms claims birth in Hessia since there wasn't a Germany then.

And among the people I know, if you're from one of those big islands of the coast of Europe you're English, unless you have an Irish or Scottish accent.

101> Yeah, it's projects like this that really accent how badly Tim needs to get working on the Author's With the Same Name problem.

What about authors who are Basque or Native American or French Canadian? That is, what about people who live within the borders of a given sovereign state but do not identify with the nationality that "goes with" that state? I'm not talking about ethnicity, but the politics of national identification. Also, I have in my library an author from Catalonia (Pere Calders). Catalonia is an autonomous community of the Kingdom of Spain.

It doesn't matter what nationality they identify with because you have no way of knowing that. In Catalonia, like in the Basque countries, etc there are people who consider themselves "hardcore" Catalans and they would hit you with a bat if you dare call them Spanish. However, there are also many who wish this whole separatist issue would get resolved and Spain were more united. You have no way of knowing what the author considered himself/herself, so to replace "Spain" with "Catalonia" would seem every bit as reductionist to someone who considers the whole of Spain his homeland as replacing "Catalonia" with "Spain" is to a Catalan nationalist. The problem with replacing one term for another is that you inevitably lose something statistically. Same goes for Scotland etc. People don't seem to realize that, yes you lose sth when you only say "UK" but you also lose something if you have "Scotland, UK" and "England, UK" as different nationalities: you lose the common denominator - UK - and a way to pull all the authors from UK regardless of whether they were (or considered themselves to be) Scottish or Irish or English or Welsh.

In terms of what we're sacrificing, I would say it's better to sacrifice the very specific and stick to sovereign states. Unless, I'm repeating myself but, unless there is a way to have the statistics reflect the relationship between these: i.e. that one is part of the other and not distinct from it. In which case we would be able to pull both a) only Scottish writers in our library and also b) all writers from the UK including Scottish ones.

(Totally a side issue!)
#96
That shouldn't be an issue any more than it should be for the Dead/Alive issue; unless CK applies to every author on a shared page, it should not be filled in. (So gender frequently can be, in these cases, but not anything else.)
Exceptions exist, of course, for edge cases when one author is overwhelmingly dominant. But this really isn't an issue.

It still is an issue as far as I'm concerned: I think if an author page has 10 or 20 items of carefully-filled out CK, it shouldn't all be ditched if the page is later split. We're all volunteers, and finding out that something you put a lot of effort into has been blanked is the kind of thing that discourages most volunteers.

So if I'm splitting an author page that already has CK, I put #1 author is the subject of the CK information above and leave it at that - when separate author pages arrive, the information will still be there. After all, we don't delete all author photos off split pages.

>98
I appreciate what you're saying. It's not really a protest as such.

As others have mentioned, the system is badly broken by lack of disambiguation; the (very nice) meme stuff like the current topic just highlights this. lorax mentioned the case where one is "overwhelmingly dominant", which is difficult to define, obviously, but I was applying such a rule which I wouldn't care to quantify.

I suppose my general feeling is that if you have an multi-author name, you can either have no data at all, or data that's right 90% of the time, and wrong 10% of the time. The %age break that makes the later ok is open to discussion (ad nauseum I suspect), but I can't help feeling that when Stephen King, respected author of books on goat husbandry, visits the site, I'm guessing that he'll be more put out that he's totally bundled up with some other guy in general, than that his date of birth is wrong. Though maybe he'll be pleasantly surprised by how many people have him as a favourite author.

>104 I wasn't trying to suggest that we should ask the authors what they consider themselves to be. That would be a mess beyond compare. I was mostly just trying to find out how to label authors from countries that contain multiple nations so that I don't screw up the data. I don't mind, for example, labeling an author from Scotland as "UK". I just now went in and fixed some authors from my library that were mislabeled. It just feels imprecise and inelegant to me. So I'll update CK data to community standards. I just won't find the data terribly useful for some authors.

I also simply wanted to point out that saying that everyone who lives within the borders of a sovereign state has the nationality of that state is not an accurate guideline for establishing someone's nationality and that nationality can be a very politically charged form of identity. It also occurred to me that if there was some author that dedicated his or her life to Basque independence, then calling him or her Spanish for our own convenience would be rather disrespectful.

>100
Also, and this could just be an American thing, but people here in my part of the country don't think in terms of the United Kingdom. It's just not how they order the world.

Ok... I hate to tell you, but I don't think people in your part of the country get to order the geography of NW Europe as such.

Part of Ireland "belongs" to Ireland and part to England.

Part of Ireland (the landmass) is the Republic of Ireland. The other part of part of the UK.

(But the terms "English" and "British" mean exactly the same thing).

Please stop pandering to my stereotypes of American geographical knowledge...

(And then they'd look at you funny for even thinking that people from Scotland could be anything but Scottish.)

Well, there are probably one or two people in Scotland who feel a bit like that too, but even so... I feel that a reasonably simple solution is called for for our purposes here, in which case the state/passport test seems as good as guide as any.

Personally, I'd probably identify as British, Londoner, European, English in that order (fwiw, my mother was Scottish but I've lived in England all of my life). Mileage will obviously vary, but when is comes down to it, "I'm not British, I'm Welsh" is factually inaccurate.

Just to throw in a political factor which some may not be aware of, strongly identifying as "English" has an unfortunate implication to many of jingoistic nationalism. There are attempts to remedy this; not entirely successful as yet though.

I'm wondering if it might not be more practical to have a separate field in CK to base the map on; there is already a lot of confusion in the Nationality field about whether it refers to citizenship, ethnicity, birthplace, residence, etc.

A field that is clearly defined with one value (a modern country where the author last lived, for instance, although there another choice could be made) and labeled as feeding to the map might relieve a lot of this trouble. The existing nationality field could be left as it is.

>100 "Ok... I hate to tell you, but I don't think people in your part of the country get to order the geography of NW Europe as such."

Okay, that made me laugh. (What you say is true, and I'm quite grateful that people aren't out there reordering geography.) I was referring to how people organize information within their own minds and not how the world actually is. People around here don't use the term "UK" to refer to the UK. That doesn't mean that the UK doesn't or shouldn't exist or be used as a term of nationality. It just means that different people use different words and constructs to refer to the same thing.

>104, 107

Casvelyn makes an important point in the second paragraph. An example would be Hubert Aquin, a Québécois author and activist who spent his life promoting Québec's independence... until he committed suicide, citing his despondence that Québec would likely never attain independence. For some authors, national identification is very well known and is at odds with their citizenship. Forcing someone like Aquin into "Canadian author" status seems problematic and useless.

Bobby Sands would be another example. He's currently listed as Irish. Under the rules that seem to be coming together, he would be a UK author. That seems wrong. I don't mean morally wrong or politically incorrect - just that this kind of information has no value, unless all you care to know is the modern borders within which an author was born. If we're looking to place authors within a literary tradition, our definitions or criteria will need to be different.

I recognize that this isn't a very solution-oriented post but i think it's important to hash these things out.

Throwing in another idea: How about if there is an option - determined by each user for his/her own catalog - to either see the general statistic or the more geographically specific. Let's call them option A and option B.

With option A, only the last item entered in nationality would count (and if we all agree to always enter the sovereign state as the last item that would be Spain -or UK in the popular example)
With option B, all the items entered under nationality would count. (So if an author has Catalonia and Spain as nationality option B would show both of them)
The user would be able to switch between the two - kind of like switching styles in "your library".

>111

You point about Sands is completely true. I was thinking about that in reference to my authors from the Roman Empire. Yes, Ovid was from the piece of land now know as Italy, but since Italy as a country did not formally exist until 1861, labeling Ovid as having a nationality of Italy makes absolutely no sense. Therefore, I think that the map data should come from a separate field from the nationality data. The physical geography of the world has not changed all that much over the X thousand years that people have been writing books. Political geography, on the other hand, has changed many times. When I was a kid, Czechoslovakia was one country and Germany was two. There was this massive place called the USSR. Myanmar was still called Burma and Yugoslavia still existed. But no matter what country controls the confluence of the Sava and Danube Rivers, there will still be authors from the physical location known as Belgrade.

Edited to add that i'm aware Bobby Sands was also a British MP, in order to head off that line of debate. :)

Oops, i meant to edit post 111.

The bane of categorisation is humptydumptyism (using a word to mean precisely what YOU mean it to be). And vice versa. In other words, getting people to agree on issues of nationality is like squaring the circle, and any solution on LT will have to be part of a process of compromise. Good luck, LT!

I object to item #3. It's bad data. Don't like it. My family is German ethnicity, but they were from Wurtemburg when it was a separate country. And then they settled New South Russia, which is now Ukraine. Their nationalities were Wurtemburg and Russia, not Germany and Ukraine. I hate shoehorning in bad data to make the code easier.

For the record, I object to Ovid in Romania. He was exiled there, hated it and wrote copiously about it. You might as well say Napoleon was a citizen of St. Helena.

I hate shoehorning in bad data to make the code easier.

It's not to make the code easier. It's to make it displayable on a map.

>115

Right. There's no answer here. So we can either decide the hump it and not enter the data, or enter it knowing there are problems at the edges.

>118

And i think that by and large we're doing the latter: entering the data, knowing that there may be some issues to sort out, but with the assumption that things will settle into a system that is agreeable to most.

#111: Forcing someone like Aquin into "Canadian author" status seems problematic and useless.

And yet, that's what most of us did when we heard Québécois.

Under the rules that seem to be coming together, he would be a UK author. That seems wrong. I don't mean morally wrong or politically incorrect - just that this kind of information has no value, unless all you care to know is the modern borders within which an author was born.

And? He was born in the UK, he died a guest of Her Majesty's Government, he was a British MP, he was a member of a very UK organization, the Provisional Irish Republican Army--an organization formed to cause political change in the UK and that acted in the UK. If he wanted to live in the Republic of Ireland, he could have moved there; he didn't. He choose to fight over his little piece of land that was and is clearly part of the UK.

I love the idea of a map, and I'd hate to lose that because of the edge cases.

117> How about you make the fields:

Birthplace
Places of Residence
Place of Death

And make them only allow lat/lons? Approximate values will be accepted.

Then plotting them on the map will be easy-peasy.

;)

#111: If we're looking to place authors within a literary tradition, our definitions or criteria will need to be different.

Yes, and? Literary traditions don't care much about borders sometimes. What was Josephus's literary tradition? It was surely heavily affected by both Judean and Roman styles. Lovecraft was influenced by British authors more than American ones; should we label his nationality as Britain?

I continue to want to put Zamenhof's nationality as Esperantujo, no matter how much that isn't a real nation. I could also put it down as Eastern European Jewish. But for the purposes of his nationality, he was a citizen of the Russian Empire, and he lived in what is currently Poland. That is what the nationality box is for, nations.

No, lat/lon won't work for large amounts of data. It needs to be countries. We can plot lat/lon on a map, but plotting MANY on a map makes people complain about speed. Google's map JavaScript can't handle thousands of points without making many users miserable.

> 122

And make them only allow lat/lons?

If you did that, you'd get much less data. I doubt that many people would search out that information.

aside/
there are probably one or two people in Scotland who feel a bit like that too
More than one or two.
/aside

I hate shoehorning in bad data to make the code easier.

It's not to make the code easier. It's to make it displayable on a map.

It's still shoehorning. It's still inaccurate, whatever the purpose is.

I'd prefer either, and in this order, 1) a separate field for current day location of someone's nationality, which overrides the nationality field if the latter doesn't compute, or 2) some kind of notice in the last line that indicates that the data listed there is not accurate, and that this is just the present-day location of the nationality listed above:
Scotland
United Kindgom (current location)

(or something like that)

And make them only allow lat/lons?

If you did that, you'd get much less data. I doubt that many people would search out that information.

No, the point is, I can take a real-world address and turn it into Lat/Lon pretty easily. Not "Ottoman Empire" but certainly "England."

United Kindgom (current location)

Okay, why don't I put that in the hint text--that the last one will be used to place the person on a map, and to use "(current location)"?

If they're dead, that's probably not their current location. "(current name of country)"?

127>

If you put a hint, please specify that "current location" is only used when the proper nationality doesn't exist anymore. Otherwise you'll get things like "Well, gee, this guy's French, but he's on sabbatical in New Zealand for a month, I'd better put NZ because it says "current location"!

128 - it's hard to find the right language here. It's not necessarily the current name of the same country (think: Scotland :: United Kingdom example, or Republic of Geneva :: Switzerland).

Current location of nationality? If it's in the nationality field, though, won't it be clear that current location applies not to the author's physical location but to his/her nationality's location?

What about "Present-Day Location" or "Modern Location"?

This would cover most of the multiple-nationality, one country problem as well. The Québécois are part of the modern/present-day country of Canada, whether they want to be or not.

But I still want to be able to note that Ovid was Roman somewhere, even if that doesn't feed into the graph or map. That's just good history.

(Current location) can be misinterpreted to mean the current location of the body, as opposed to the modern name for the location being mapped. Whether or not that's where the author is, or the author's remains happen to rest.

I propose (Current name for map location).

ETA: Okey, beat by numerous posters making the same point.

In the CK group thread that popped up about this, "present day" was proposed:

Nationality:
- Alsace
- France (present day)

Or maybe
Nationality:
- Germany (Alsace)
- France (present day)

depending on when it was, I guess.

I'm still thinking a separate field would be better for mapping purposes: say, "Map this author."

One reason is that the "take the last line as definitive" feature has other unfortunate effects. Aravind Adiga, for instance, has both India and Australia listed as nationalities. That's all fine and logical: India was his first nationality, and he gained Australian citizenship later as well. He now lives in India.

Because Australia is listed last on the list, though, it gets him completely both for the stats/graph and for any future mapping feature. That seems problematic to me.

(present-day country name)

ETA: I should've refreshed before posting. I like (modern location too, but a separate field is even better.

"Modern Location" sounds good.

I like the "Map this author" idea.

As hint text, what about...

"Location - current name of state"

or

"Location - current name of country"

?

137>

Better make that "country". Most people from the US (even here on LT, I'm sorry to say) will see "state" and think "US state".

That lat/lon thing was mainly a joke. It was in response to how tangled up all this stuff gets.

Google's map JavaScript can't handle thousands of points without making many users miserable.

Oy, vey. That's EXACTLY what I've been working on the last couple of weeks. It's especially bad on the iPad (and I'm sure older iPhone is even worse, but I don't have to deal with that.) Turns out, there are several different ways to approach it that make it handle thousands of markers just fine. Three main ways in v3: Fusion Tables, KML and MultiMarker. If you ever DO need to make your maps a bit snappier with larger number of markers, feel free to ask and I'll pass along the executive summary.

I suggest 'Map this author' with a dropdown picklist of the approximately 200 nations extant in 2010.

I know this has been said already, but I think it bears repeating-- what if someone holds dual citizenship? How would immigrant literature be classified?

A further thought: What about indigenous authors? Lumping an indigenous author into the "Canadian", "Australian", or "American", etc. categories can be contentious and problematic too.

I think rsterling is right about adding another field.

141 That's a big problem, I think: see my post 134. I'm not sure the "last line is definitive" approach always makes sense.

Just to be a problem, by international treaties there are almost 200 nations in North America.

Not practical for this purpose but a fact.

Perhaps the whole idea should be scrapped to stop unnecessary tensions.

(BTW - what are the "wording" and "modern wording" fields that appear in the drop-down menu in CK history? Are they connected to this discussion, or something unrelated? I don't see the fields on the author or work page.)

Ugh ugh ugh.

Do not like at all.

Nationality isn't a place thing, it's a citizenship thing.

I'd much rather the map be built on the residence CK field.

#144
Perhaps the whole idea should be scrapped to stop unnecessary tensions.

A lot of the tensions were already there (just look at the England vs England, UK disagreement upthread!); it's just that now a lot more people are actually looking at what is in that field.

That particular problem can be solved on its own without having to dig up thousands of new problems as well.

Add another vote for a 'map this author' box.

For people with dual citizenship or who were born in one country but later obtained citizenship in another country, you have to pick one. I would say the one in which they are most well known as.

On the country name v lat/long question...

Country name would be fine for the pie chart, but for a map, if you don't further distinguish the location all Australian authors will be piled up in the Red Centre like Japanese tourists at Uluru! All US authors will be piled up in the geographical centre of the USA.

Zooming such a map would be an exercise in futility.

Geolocation and mapping software* is advancing in leaps and bounds at the moment, and I think that we should 'future-proof' our data.

*(edit) as, of course, are computer power and internet speeds.

151> Is that what it's going to look like? I had in mind maybe countries would get color coded by how many authors were in them and maybe you could hover to get their names. But I'm sure Tim has something entirely different in mind.

151>

I've seen and made maps with this API. Color-coding by number is how they work.

Good point, Jeff. I was presuming a Google Maps type interface, but that "ain't necessarily so".

In any case, geographically large but sparsely populated countries will need to be considered.

For the record, my preference would be a separate nationality field for mapping purposes and the ability to map both that field and a new 'birthplace' field.

Edit: Thanks lorax.

I actually prefer a birthplace graph to a nationality graph (or even a current residence graph) as the birthplace will not change.

>155
If you do birthplace, you end up with other types of misleading data, e.g. Doris Lessing being counted as Persian.

I don't think there's ever going to be a way of reducing it to one piece of data per author that works for everyone. The important thing is to try to find a compromise that produces meaningful aggregated data on the graph without cutting into the very important flexibility of the individual records in CK. We mustn't fall into the trap of imposing all sorts of extra rules on CK just so that we get neat graphs.

One thought: couldn't the graph be cleaned up by trimming off everything followed by a comma when parsing the CK data (i.e. "England, UK" appears on the graph as "UK")?

> 156

Well, how about two side-by-side graphs? Have brthplace/current residence graphs.

Perhaps those two graphs pictured together would actually give a better picture of authors. So many of our noted authors are exiled or have emigrated from their place of bith. However, their writing does reflect the setting of those countries in which they were born and raised.

(example: Isabel Allende: birthplace=Chile, residence=USA)

In addition, it's often hard to tell a person's nationality per passport. Which authors have given up their original citizenship? Which authors have dual citizenship? This information is often not readily available. Of the two citizenships, which is most important? Some authors live in one country part of the year; they then live in another country the rest of the year. :S

This seems somewhat meaningless. After all, I look at my stats and see that Boethius is listed as "Roman Empire" but Virgil is listed as "Italian". Trotsky is listed as a Ukrainian, surely a theoretical concept during his life. Geoffrey of Monmonth - should he be listed as Welsh, U.K., Anglo-Norman, Norman?

The idea, which I'm not very comfortable with, is the make the last entry in Nationality be the modern-day country that corresponds to the most significant place that the person lived. For Boethius, someone needs to research where in the Roman Empire he lived and add the equivalent modern day country as the last Nationality.

Have we lost sight of rsterling's suggestion in #134? That seems to me to be a very reasonable solution to these apparently irreconcilable arguments. The 'Map this author' will read only present day countries - if the display is a map then Geoffrey of Monmouth will land up in the UK area with Bobbie Sands, Dylan Thomas, Sir Walter Scott and Trotsky will end up on that part of the map which used to be a part of Mother Russia. There will be no list showing Trotsky as Ukrainian nor any other solecisms.

There will probably be minor edit-wars like that over Poppy Z Brite's gender but so what?

The problem with someone like Boethus is that there is no good choice. He was born in Italy to a patrician family about 485 AD, under the Visigoths and after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. But he surely considered himself a Roman - not an Italian - yet he served as a diplomat for the Visigoths (and committed treason against them).

Several of the other examples I gave above are just as convoluted. And the other examples given by those above - Doris Lessing as Persian? Rhodesian? Zimbabwean? English?

Another vote for "map this author" field....but if possible with a pre-defined picklist of available countries. The hint text could explain that this is for mapping a geographic location to a current country/sovereign state.

It would stop any bad data creeping in and ensure a 1:1 match to google codes which appears to be a requirement.

The thing that bothers me about the last entry being the determining one is that it is so easy for someone to come along, hit the add-a-line button, and presto, the author has moved. It may be a perfectly valid entry; but any new entry is always going to be the last one.

163> Make new entries add at the top?

Icky, yeah. But perhaps a workaround.

I think the Map This Author field would be much better that bending the Nationality field to fit. However, I don't believe a picklist is possible, at least not without a lot of work. CK was implemented as a fielded wiki which I think limits the fields to only allowing string values.

165> Then again, the author CK field for gender has a radio group. No idea if they had to kludge that in, though.

Ok, ok. Let's add a "map this author" field.

Several of the other examples I gave above are just as convoluted. And the other examples given by those above - Doris Lessing as Persian? Rhodesian? Zimbabwean? English?

There could be some sort of vote for contested authors, (like we had for similar tags being combined into one) and then Doris Lessing would be whatever the majority of voters decide she is.

163: The thing that bothers me about the last entry being the determining one is that it is so easy for someone to come along, hit the add-a-line button, and presto, the author has moved. It may be a perfectly valid entry; but any new entry is always going to be the last one.

When you try to combine two works that shouldn't be combined there is a little disambiguation notice warning you not to do it. Maybe we could have a similar message pop up that asks people to please maintain the last entry as such (and if they want to add another entry, make sure they add the proper one AFTER it.)

#161: I don't see why there's no good choice for Boethus; if he was a Roman, then he'd be a modern-day Italian. Doris Lessing is a little more complex, but she's surely not Persian; being born in a land to English parents who leave by the time you are six is not much of a connection. Reading Wikipedia, since 1949, she's resided in England, so surely the best single answer is UK.

#160: Why is Geoffrey of Monmouth being part of the UK not a solecism, but Trotsky being a Ukrainian, where he was born, grew up and studied, a solecism?

Ok, ok. Let's add a "map this author" field.

Hooray! Now to revert all those changes made to the Nationality field over the last few days.

170>

Now to revert all those changes made to the Nationality field over the last few days.

Like hell you will. All my edits have been entirely legitimate and unambiguous. Just because it may not be valid to label someone from the Roman Empire as "Italy" doesn't mean that I can't put "USA" for the nationality of someone who has never lived anywhere else.

171> I was being a bit broad there. You are perfectly free to not revert anything that truly belongs in the Nationality field. But any modern countries added for an ancient author should be reverted, in my opinion.

>169 Oh dear, I do dislike tetchiness! I think that what I wrote is not how you interpret it. The point that I was trying to make was that putting an author on a map is less likely to be contentious than having a list in which the author is designated to a nationality that would not, in their lifetimes, have been possible or which would have been anathema to them.

Ok, so I have a question. I was doing this:

England (birth), USA (1)

Neil L. Whitehead

France (birth), UK (1)

Ernest Gellner

because I thought the last category would place the author under one particular country.

Apparently not, since now I have accidentally created entirely new categories. I don't think that is the point, so how should I enter the data? (I don't like the huge list of "not set" authors that I have).

I mean honestly I don't know whether Whitehead is a US citizen, but he has been here quite a while....

....Or are we now doing something totally different?

174> Each entry in CK has to be on a separate line, rather than separated by commas.

174: Apparently not, since now I have accidentally created entirely new categories. I don't think that is the point, so how should I enter the data?

The mistake you made is that you entered them in the same line (and thus as one nationality) . For Neil Whitehead (to use your own example), click on edit nationality, write England (birth) and then you'll see that under what you wrote there's a button that says "Add Item" (or is it "Add More"?).Click that button. A new line will appear, where you can enter USA.

ETA: oops, rsterling beat me to it

175, 176: Thank you. I will now fix the entries that I screwed up :)

Ok, ok. Let's add a "map this author" field.

Thank you!

Sorry, I still don't understand:
Does nationality=citizenship? Do we have a clear answer on this?
Maybe because I am from the U.S. this is confusing, because if you are born here, you are a U.S. citizen. I understand that is not the case in many countries.

ETA:
in fact, now that I look at this entire thread and some of the entries, I am concerned about getting this right. For example, someone has marked Henry Grunwald as Austrian. I know he was born in Austria, but barely escaped with his life during WWII, so I am pretty sure he had U.S. citizenship. I don't know if he would have considered himself Austrian or American...

Thank you,

k4k

Perhaps our Scots and Welsh friends will offer an opinion about equating "UK" with "England."

180: And perhaps our Northern Irish friends will offer an opinion about being left out of the UK discussion twice now.

> 179: Does nationality=citizenship?

To my mind : yes. I have lived in several countries, but my nationality has never changed.

Some people, however, do change nationality - your Henry Grunwald is probably a good example.

Question then remains: which one should be listed as counting for the graph?

Hm, waiting to see where we will end up in this discussion. But to my mind it's silly to see people like Julius Caesar and Cicero under Roman Empire, while during their lives Rome still was a republic.

Tim - can you provide a simple definition of what you think should be entered in the "Map" field? And the Nationality one(s) for that matter.

#182

Well yes and no.

Falkland Islanders and Gibraltarians are full British citizens.

UK (Gibraltar) and UK (Falkland Islands) looks wrong. On a map they would be plonked down on south England (I guess) rather than the place they identify with.

British nationality is a horrible mess - there are many different categories. For example "As of 2007, 3.44 million of Hong Kong residents had the status as British National (Overseas), although only 800,000 of them held a valid British National (Overseas) passport." (wikipedia.org). Holders of this nationality are Commonwealth citizens, but not British citizens. They are not granted right of abode anywhere, including the United Kingdom and Hong Kong, through their British National (Overseas) status. I think that is basically unmappable.

>185 I would happily map your hypothetical British National (Overseas) passport holding Hong Kong domiciled author in Hong Kong - surely that is appropriate? In the Nationality field you might want to put something different.

Equally, #183's Caesar and Cicero would be mapped in Italy.

Yes, mapwize I'm more worried by these "authors"

http://www.librarything.com/author/razielhamelech

http://www.librarything.com/author/doctorwho

>187

The first one has no works listed and the second is not really the author of those works....but when resident on Earth he was usually based in the UK if that helps! : )

;-) I admit I am puzzled why people attribute works to Dr. Who.

The books attributed to the first one ended up on the page for the editor of the most common English translation. "He" will still show up in authors lists though for people who attribute the book to "him".

Interesting question regarding this graph.

How does it take into account the split authors?

190>

Same as it does anything else. It uses the last value filled in. Which illustrates why CK data should not be filled in in these cases.

Look, the graph itself doesn't introduce any of these issues, which are all present in the underlying CK data. It just surfaces them for many people.

Split authors should not have CK info that doesn't apply to all of them. (Yes, I know, some do).

(1) Go for "map this author" field.
(2) For maximum effectiveness and utility and madcap happiness include date ranges. Let people look at the map with or without dates.

Reasons not to use "nationality":
(1) There's no reason why a map should refer specifically to citizenship, nationality, identity, residence, or any other thing, in particular -- it's an arbitrary decision.
(2) There is simply no way of knowing with any reasonable accuracy which geopolitical entity someone "ought" to be identified with -- "ought" is an arbitrary choice of identities, actions, circumstances.
(3) I really dislike the idea of assigning people to nationality based on their preferred identity: the assumption is that people who aren't known to have expressed an expatriate identity are therefore happy to have a default national or state identity. Not true.
(4) Complex relationships of people to various geopolitical entities that overlap, separate, join, and so forth, make it impractical -- the UK / Great Britain / England / British Isles problem is one example; but consider any modern nation-state that includes multiple nations, and all the changes, and failed states, and revolutions, and federalism, and independence movements.
(5) headaches. this gives me a headache.

I'm embarrassed to ask... what does CK stand for?

Common Knowledge - not really an intuitive abbreviation.

Suggested direction for "map this author":

Specify the current (21st-century) country name for the geographic place that the author would call "home."

One simple question:
Can the "Not set" group be marked on the pie chart in a different color? Putting them in "other" skews the view.

Did we come to any conclusions about 'not a person' authors? A lot of them do, actually, have a geographic location (National Geographic Society is definitely USA), but are we putting it in? And some don't have a location - international groups, or multi-national multiple or split authors. Can we set N/A so the ones that definitely _don't_ have a location are separated out?

All very nice, but what about Texas?

>195
Thanks for clearing that up. I feel so silly now after wracking my brain looking to no avail. Not intuitive is a nice way to make me feel better! :-)

196> Specify the current (21st-century) country name for the geographic place that the author would call "home."

I think current ought to be good enough. 21st-century is a problem if there are any countries that have changed (or will change) since 2000. Also, I think the criteria should be the area the author is most associated with. Marjane Satrapi's current home is in France as far as I know, but she is best known for writing about growing up in Iran. So I'd humbly suggest,

Specify the current country name for the geographic place that the author is most associated with.

Which makes some Ancient Greeks into Turks or Italians...

Suggested Strategy (in order of importance)?

1. Finish splitting authors.
2. Use birthplace for map, since that is the most definable term.
3. Figure out what to do about Texas.

Yours in confusion,

k4k

202> No it doesn't because the field isn't Nationality, it's Map This Author. All it does is locate those Ancient Greeks in what is today Turkey or Italy.

And what's the problem with Texas?

Has anyone gone through their authors and determined how many can't be mapped because they're split. If we can show a not insubstantial percentage maybe we can persuade he ought to make separate author pages for split authors his next project.

205>

Tim's known that separate pages for split authors are important for years now; they're not done now because they're hard, not because he doesn't think they matter, and a minor fun little feature like this isn't going to convince him of anything.

Besides, it's just as important for Alive/Dead, and there the aggregation has been done for years.

Okay, I've caved and made a new CK field for it. See http://www.librarything.com/topic/104238

But this feature just highlights that it's still a problem and it's only going to get worst (as more authors are added more of them are going to have the same names).

#202: Which is historically completely accurate.

There is a lot of work that has still to be done to split same-name authors and the work will be ongoing. Not everyone who enters their John Smith book will be motivated to ensure it goes on the right page. There will be plenty for the mildly OCD of us to spend their time on and I don't see this as something that will have a software solution. It will be great when the split authors have their own pages but I must say that I don't see it as a desperately urgent problem.

>209
It's certainly not. Herodotos was not a Turk, he lived in what is now Turkey. There's a huge difference, which is why this feature has got to be very clear on what it is that is being mapped: nationality or physical location.

Then we shall map in the shade. (link is to today's SMBC cartoon)

Herodotus's nationality was not Greece, either. Nationality-wise, he seems to have been born in the city-state of Halicarnassus and died in Macedon. A national of Halicarnassus seems to map most closely to a national of modern-day Turkey.

Yeah, in his day and age there was no such thing as a Greek nationality - more an awareness of Greek ethnicity...

(But the new field just for mapping him should do the trick).

Right. He was born in Halicarnassus. It was part of Caria, which was subject to the Persian Empire but had more "substance" to it--local dynasts serving for the Persians rather than externally-appointed ones--than many Persian possessions. He moved around, but he was and is strongly identified with Halicarnassus. He may have died in Macedon, Athens, Thurii or somewhere else. It's not clear.

I'd map him to Turkey. I can't see a strong case for anything else. If we say he's Greek we might as well decide Bactrian Greek authors who never left Bactria should map to the modern Greek state too. Countries aren't ethnicities.

Exactly. Maybe we should call him Greek for the "Nationality Graph", but I would certainly go for Turkey on the map. (Just because there were no Turks around in his lifetime, doesn't make it a different place).

But, am I correct in thinking that "Nationality Graph" and map are now two features? Or should we change all such info with the map in mind first?

for this option, I'd go have people add them to CK, but you run into the problem of people not knowning, and not researching, where they actually lived. Perhaps a group of volunteers could undertake it? (no, I don't research well enough to handle it)

> 218: I'm absolutely willing to do my bit. But researching the locality for all authors is a bit daunting.

I believe a map based on Nationality is not going to happen. It's going to be based on the Country (for map) field instead.

104> Catalonia has not been officialy recognized as state, but it is an European nation in spite of its legal status. Catalan people will not hit you if you consider or call him Spanish (even Catalan separatists). The fact is that in the past (e. g. during Franco goverment) Catalan people have been fined, incarcerated or murdered just for the only reason to be Catalan or speak Catalan.

Catalonia has been diluted politically into four states: Spain (basically the "autonomous communities" of Catalonia, Valencia, Balearic Islands), Andorra, France (Roussillon) and Italy (the city of Alghero).

Catalan people just want to have the same rights of the rest of Spanish or French citizens that are not Catalan or Basque (or Galician or Occitan, etc.), but they are not violent at all.

Nobody is suggesting you, or Catalans, are violent. And this is a fine example of one of the reasons why we are trying to find another description than "nationality" for placing people.

As it stands now you can enter an author as Catalonian, and still put Spain, or France, or even Italy just for locating him/her on the map.

I'm trying to read through all this and make sense of it.

I have an author who was born in a city that was part of Germany at the time of his birth, but is now part of Poland. He eventually moved to the USA.

I knew him slightly, and I think he would have considered himself German. Is "Germany" OK to enter as his nationality?

BTW, this is barely related, but when I pull up the list of my authors and their nationalities, I find authors for whom I have no books listed in my collection. Why would this happen?

>223 I find authors for whom I have no books listed in my collection

This happens to me, too. I have assumed that it a consequence of author and work combining leaving a name (maybe an identical name) bereft of works. The books will still be in your library but under the combined author.

And -- I would call your aquaintance German - I think that's the sort of information which is worth preserving.

I think under the rules set down the area of him "home" would now be in Poland so he should be listed there. Remember, we aren't talking about ethnicities, just geographical areas (and we're stuck with countries because that's easy for Tim to do).

ETA: That would be for the new field. For the Nationality field Germany may be correct.

>225 For the Nationality field Germany may be correct.

Just so.

Mapping his birthplace would put him in Poland. For 'Map the author', if he had spent his working life in the US, I'd be inclined to map him as USA but it will be difficult to make rigid rules that fit every case. The Wisdom of Crowds??

a consequence of author and work combining leaving a name (maybe an identical name) bereft of works

It happens all the time. One of the downsides of work combining is that it can leave some valid author pages seemingly empty.

226 For 'Map the author', if he had spent his working life in the US, I'd be inclined to map him as USA but it will be difficult to make rigid rules that fit every case. The Wisdom of Crowds??

Didn't Tim say that we could have more than one country listed, and that the author would be included/mapped for both?

Yes, something like that anyway.

221: Uhm, the hitting you over the head with a bat thing was an exaggeration to make a point, I would not have imagined that anyone would think I suggested actual physical violence would follow if you call a Catalan Spanish.

In any case, you can now enter an author's nationality as Catalan (and Spain as country for mapping purposes)

> 223: I would say: nationality = German(y), location (map) = Poland.

This is VERY cool. But I seem to have over 2000 authors of unknown origin, including myself and my uncle, so that is throwing off my statistics. I must figure out how to set nationalities for some of these authors.

Yes, I have much the same problem - including you in fact, since I I have (one of) your books. Are you Dutch, are you American? How should I know?

American, thanks for asking!
And so's my uncle, Donald Honig, but you probably don't have any of his books. Our subject matter doesn't overlap at all: he writes about baseball.

>228 Didn't Tim say that we could have more than one country listed, and that the author would be included/mapped for both?

Interestingly we are foreseeing mapping an author to more than one country but not allowing authors from a nation without state to be mapped to their nation, although it exists on earth and it is recogniscible on a map.

BTW The note on the Nationality field explains:
USA, France (birth), or Turkey (passport). Choose a country or place, not a demonym.
i.e. not German but Germany, not Catalan but Catalonia (or?)

Hi, Annamorphic!

I've set both your nationality and your uncle's, so at least that's two down!

It's very daunting, the number of un-set nationalities that I have; this is likely to prove even harder than the Dead or Alive meme to get sorted out.

I have a question. When I was looking at my nationalities graph, I noticed that P. G. Wodehouse was listed as having USA nationality, which just seems wrong. I mean he was a naturalized citizen who spent much of his life in the US, but I think most people would consider him a UK writer. I can reverse the order on his author page to go naturalization, birth, but that seems nearly as wrong as having him listed wrong on the graph. Anyone have any suggestions on which is the better choice?

>237
I don't think there's a sensible single answer for Wodehouse. If you'd asked him after the war, he'd certainly have said "American" - he loved America from the first time he went there (about 1904, I think) and was very hurt by the way the British treated him about the Berlin broadcasts. But England is where his roots were and where he got most of the subject-matter for his books.

I see there's now an additional field. Does this mean that I should change the Nationality field again for my authors? I ask this in the UK context and whether I should be putting Nationality as Scotland and Place as UK or do I leave as-is and keep UK for both? For a map though surely it will have to be a particularly small map or will all US authors be pinned/coloured in exactly the same place over that continent sized country?

On the UK/England etc question I like to divide UK up into constituent parts for a clearer picture of where the works are coming from. Using UK is a bit like using The Commonwealth from my POV.

I like this feature and I love the idea.
I am wondring a bit about the following:
If I open a Authors page on http://www.librarything.com/author/ of on http://www.librarything.de/author/ the Common Knowlegde informations are different. Now I am a bit confused, if I edit informations about an Author do I have to do it on the different language pages or will (some day) all using the same Common Knowlegde informations? and does it matter if I write Germany or Deutschland in the Nationality (Nationalität) field?

In his original post, Tim says that the graph is currently using only English (.com) CK. So info on the .de site is currently not being used for this.

For general CK - as of right now, most of the information is different on different language sites - they don't combine. Canonical Name does, a bit, and it causes a lot of problems, but most don't. So yes, you should enter it into all the sites you care about, and on each site it should be entered in the language of the site - so Deutschland on the .de site, Germany on the .com site. Which is a pain. Someday Tim will figure out how to use the information from all the sites, but not yet...

> 216 I agree completely with BarkingMatt
> 217 I also agree in two different features

An idea about localization on a map or maps

I am interested to see:
a) the birthplace of an author
b) where he lived (multiple places)
c) where he died
d) where he is buried
e) ...

In the nearer future:
- A map with the actual borders of countries
- All known places of an author have been marked by a symbol or as pop-up information (place of birth, living, death, etc.)

For the further future:

Interactive Maps where I can display the borders of different historical periods/years, etc.

In CK this would mean:
A field for "places" with multiple entries with two informations each:
1) place (localization: existing countries, or betteer: geographic coordinates
2) category (birth, death, living, etc.) this information should by chosen out of a list of predefined items: pop-up list

(Please excuse my poor english)

Wow. That all looks fun, but it's a whole different category of maps - what's currently planned (as far as I can tell) is an aggregate map, showing (a little bit of information on) all the authors in a catalog or (possibly) all the authors on LT. What you're asking for is a lot of detail on a single author. As I said, it looks like fun, but there are a lot of authors that don't have the data entered to support this kind of detail. Maybe eventually...

>244
I agree,
... but LT-Members like to be perfect
and like to have perfect data ;-)

So I believe they are willing to put in the data.

>241, 242
If Tim could solve the problem you wrote about in #242, that would be a big step into that direction.

>243
Maybe the options in Google Earth could be used?

http://www.librarything.com/author/eliasnorbert

How about this man? He was born a German national of Jewish parentage in Breslau, Silesia - now part of Poland. He served in the German Army in WW1 and lived in Germany for the first third of his long life. He fled to Paris and thence to the UK before WW2. He was interned for a short while in the UK but eventually took British citizenship which he seems to have retained throughout his life. The middle third of his life was spent in the UK. After a couple of years in Ghana he moved to The Netherlands where he spent the last third of his life, frequently visiting and teaching in Germany.

I mapped him as UK - doesn't quite fill the bill, does it?

Time said that you could enter him as Poland*, UK, and Holland and it would map them all.

* I said Poland because that is where he was born and presumably his family roots were, but if he put down roots somewhere that today would be considered Germany proper during the first third of his life you add Germany as well.

Please also note that "Holland" isn't actually a country. It's merely a province - and currently split north / south as well - of a country actually called Netherlands.

Damn. I knew that too.

Not to be confused with New Holland or Pennsylvania Dutch.

> 249: No problem. I know it's just parlance slipping in.

> 250: Indeed.

I have 1309 "not set." Can I do anything to set those I know? And if so, how?

I have Richard Wright as French. Can I change that, since he was American as far as I know, unless he changed his nationality before he died.

Yes, but you will have to visit each author page separately and make the setting in Common Knowledge

Oops, Richard Wright is "composed of at least 12 distinct authors" - one of them might be French.

The books I read by Richard Wright were by the American Richard Wright.

Yeah, but currently they all share the same page - even if they are split - and the CK gets applied to all of them. For that reason it shouldn't say French either.

Wikipedia saya that the primeRichard Wright author was an American expatriate, who lived in Paris from 1946 to the end of his life in 1960 (at age 52), and was buried there. The CK knowledge seems to be all for Author #1. I frequently put a (1) beside a CK entry for the 1st author. I almost never remove someone else's CK work unless it is blatantly wrong or unidentifiable. I would have also put a (1) beside the author links.

Wikipedia saya that the prime Richard Wright author was an American expatriate, who lived in Paris from 1946 to the end of his life in 1960 (at age 52), and was buried there. The CK knowledge seems to be all for Author #1. I frequently put a (1) beside a CK entry for the 1st author, but in this case the disambiguation notice says that all CK info is for Author 1. I almost never remove someone else's CK work unless it is blatantly wrong or unidentifiable. I would have also put a (1) beside the author links, which I have now done. The link to Wright's page is:

Wikipedia saya that the prime Richard Wright author was an American expatriate, who lived in Paris from 1946 to the end of his life in 1960 (at age 52), and was buried there. The CK knowledge seems to be all for Author #1. I frequently put a (1) beside a CK entry for the 1st author, but in this case the disambiguation notice says that all CK info is for Author 1. I almost never remove someone else's CK work unless it is blatantly wrong or unidentifiable. I would have also put a (1) beside the author links, which I have now done. The link to Wright's page is: http://www.librarything.com/author/wrightrichard .

Yes, I understand and I've only very rarely removed any CK myself. But saying that all 12 authors named Richard Wright must have been Americans who moved to Paris is blatantly wrong.

p.s.: And if you put an extra "1" in either the nationality or the map field it will no longer display in the desired category.

p.p.s.: But I certainly don't want to start an edit war over this guy. I you feel it's more appropriate to have that info there, I won't remove it again.

Where one author on a split page is clearly pre-eminent, I don't see much wrong with leaving CK information about her/him as long as this is made absolutely clear in the disambiguation statement. However the mapping feature is taking data and aggregating it (in the same way as gender has been treated). Usually - but not always - you get away with leaving a gender allocation on a split author but I'm sure the Nationality / Map this author lines should be left blank in these cases.

I don't see anything wrong at this point with leaving country and nationality for Richard Wright blank, which is the status at this point. With 12 authors, I really can't speak to the status of everyone. And we can wait and clean up split authors whenever LT ennables that in a good way.

#260, #261, #262
I was very determined not to remove other people's work when it comes to CK, but I've changed my mind about the data in the aggregated fields, birth/death/nationality. (and gender for the occasional Evelyn or Chris!). The dates are normally used in the disambiguation notices anyway, and it would be easy to add nationality there as well. The information needn't be lost, so that's what I'll do in future on split pages.

I'm not going to remove residence/education/relationships/organizations/awards data, though - that's exactly the stuff that can take a lot of effort to track down, which shouldn't be wasted.

I don't remove anything. I add bracketed notations that track with the disambiguation notice, i.e., "Terry Jones is two writers: a 20th century children's book writer and a 22nd century game designer." gets "Birthdate: 2152 22nd century game designer"

In general I wouldn't remove any CK info either. But occasionally I do get the feeling that some CK info is simply too inadequate. For explanation I refer to my post at # 260.

By the way, for anyone filling in nationalities for older authors, I just stumbled upon a potential goldmine:

http://www.kingkong.demon.co.uk/ngcoba/ngcoba.htm

Birth and death dates, nationalities (when known), and genders (likewise) for a whole bunch of authors, mostly deceased.

>266
Goldmine, indeed!

Are we ok to put n/a by multi author or fake author works?

268>

Multi-author works shouldn't be an issue; it's non-human authors (books that are credited to, say, "National Geographic Society") and shared-name authors (like, say, "John Adams") where they don't necessarily share a nationality that are the issue. I've been leaving those blank, but I don't see why n/a shouldn't work.

For ordinary multi-author works, of course, each author will be entered separately, and you can just enter the data for each on their own author page (assuming they have one, which if an author is never listed as primary they won't.)

269 that would be exactly waht I meant, I've got Senate which is a publisher, a few SF writers that have released collabaritive works under a single pseudonym (some of which are UK/USA parings or similar) Hughes Cooper and Frank O'rourke which seem to be pseudonyms for nobody at all, Fiona Kelly which appears to be a sydicated writer like Carolyn Keene (Though there is Info for Carolyn Keene, i'm not sure that there should be)

The -ology (dragonology, pirateology ets) books are written by a fake person altogether (it's a group of editors), but somebody has put info for them.

I just want to be able to put them in a 'bucket' where I know I've already defined them so they aren't in the not set list anymore.

270>

Ah, I just misunderstood you, then. I don't think anyone would complain too vociferously if you just put n/a for those. (I suggested automatically excluding anything with "n/a" in the gender field way back upthread, but nothing came of that.)

What is the future for this feature now that the intended mapping has been hived off to another field? As far as I remember from upthread, the map was the rationale for putting a present-day country (ie. mappable sovereign state) on the last line of the nationality field. Is the piechart going to be a permanent feature as well as the map? In that case, I think we should reconsider the whole business of putting authors into countries that didn't exist in their day.

My understanding is - wishful thinking, maybe - that the pie chart is for nationality, i.e. Wales, Kirgistan, Persia, Roman Empire or whatever is in the 'Nationality' field and that the mapping will use that if it is a country on a current map but whatever is in the 'Map this author' if it isn't.

273>

That is exactly what it says for the fields, so yes, I think that's a reasonable understanding.

#273, #274

Does that mean that the UK label should be taken off Shakespeare, for example, since it didn't exist it his time? All the earlier disagreements about what exactly goes into the nationality field were trumped by the fiat 'It's got to be a mappable country', but since that no longer applies, I'd like to know that there's a consensus, before any edit wars start up again.

Yes, UK is an inappropriate nationality for Shakespeare.

>275
The answer is to get a download of all Shakespeare's emails mapped against the geographical coordinates of the PC he was using at the time (I'm sure Google or the NSA have that data on file somewhere) and enter it into CK as a time-space line (an isobard). If we did the same thing for Marlowe, Bacon, Mr W.H. and the Earl of Oxford as well, we could end up with something pretty nifty...

>277
Though I'm betting that Francis Walsingham's e-mails are pretty heavily encrypted ...

271> But there are some 'authors' who don't have gender that do have nationality - National Geographic is definitely USA, for instance. (I think I wrote this somewhere before, possibly in this thread...but I can't find it). I'd like to map them, at least. But for multiple authors with multiple nationalities, or groups with multiple nationalities, yeah, N/A sounds good to me. Like Musereader, I want them _out_ of my Not Set group.

279> I don't know, I feel like that's straying more into the "publisher location" territory than it is "author nationality". Yeah, you can kludge one into the other, but is it really the best fit?

> 280: Of course. But people use those companies as "authors".

281> Right, but you're kludging a kludge. They use companies for authors. And now you're trying to assign nationality to a company, because you've already pretended it's an author. Might as well assign gender, too, based on the CEO. Basically, it's just a kludge too far, in my opinion.

Personally, I'd say just leave the nationality and other fields blank when you're wedging a company into an author field.

#276
Okay, if the England pie slice is back for Shakespeare, Chaucer and so on, what happens if someone wants to see Agatha Christie in the England slice rather than the UK slice? Is there still general agreement that we should keep the UK as the final nationality line for authors who do actually belong to the UK?

282> mmm. A company doesn't inherently have a gender, but some, at least, do more-or-less inherently have nationality. If you don't like National Geographic, how about Smithsonian? That's tied to a national entity. Or the British Library. Of course, then comes the question of where to draw the line - what do the multinationals count as? But every one I can think of does have a national root - 3M is USA, Toyota is Japan...

Can you suggest one that doesn't have an inherent nationality? This is mostly for my mental comfort - if I have one solid counter-example I can rest easy. I'm not actually mapping companies, but I'm not setting them to N/A either - yet.

But the underlying question is do you want to see nationalities of companies in your pie chart of nationalities of authors? My answer is no, it doesn't make sense.

284> I don't agree that a company or institution has a nationality any more than I agree my cat has a nationality. At least, not in the way this Nationality field is for. It's turning it into something different enough to be an entirely separate field.

Put me down in the camp in favor of companies and other entities having a nationality - it seems to me to be very obvious that the British Library is, well, British!

Oh, absolutely. I do see your point. I've always been uncomfortable with seeing such "authors" getting birth dates as well.

In a way an American company/institution could be said to have American nationality. Sure. But now that we have another field for putting them on the map, "n/a" for nationality might be better.

I think it should work the way it does for the alive/dead graph: if N/A is checked for gender, that author shows up as 'Not a Person'. I think that 'Not a Person' should be used on the nationality chart as well.

> 283: England is not a nation state and therefore it isn't a nationality - not since 1707 at least.

I don't mind if the field also says "England" though, as long as it's not in the overruling position.

288> It just seems to needlessly pollute the statistics to me. I care about authors that are real people, not authors who are not listed and therefore get covered up by some corporation or institution.

Like I say - I do see the point. Waiting to see if we reach some consensus here, but absoultely willing to change "nationality" for those non-personal authors to n/a (and move that bit of info to the map field).

292> Well, I don't think there's much of a middle ground on consensus short of Tim adding more field/structure to track things about the publisher. But don't sweat it. I'm just expressing my opinion, after all, not telling you what to do. All of the above are just my own personal feeling about the thing. As far as I know, Tim's never really addressed the subject, and all the documentation I could find for Nationality is not all that forthcoming. When you type out/read things in the message boards, it can seem people are taking them way more seriously than what was intended. I don't take this all that seriously, in that it's a small slice of a minor part of my LT experience. Hope that puts my messages into perspective. :)

284> Can you suggest one that doesn't have an inherent nationality? This is mostly for my mental comfort - if I have one solid counter-example I can rest easy. I'm not actually mapping companies, but I'm not setting them to N/A either

United Nations? Do an author search and you will get over 300 from 'United Nations'. OK, one says 'New York United Nations' but the rest are international.

OK, yes, UN works well. The headquarters are in New York, but the bits of it that publish things are all over the world, and the entity itself is multinational - so that one would get a N/A in both fields.

And by the way, I never meant putting it in the Nationality field - I agree with brightcopy on that, actually (msg 286). I meant putting it in the Map field. Sorry, I used lazy terminology. It was never a question before the Map field existed - that one can accurately be used for companies and similar, where Nationality really can't.

Did we ever get an answer on whether the pie chart will draw from Map as well? I think not, so the companies wouldn't show up in the pie chart (assuming N/A in the Nationality field gets suppressed), but they'd show up on the map (which might be interesting).

I've been putting n/a in nationality for institutions and groups etc

Shouldn't the list be weighted by the number of books per author? Under the current system, a single book by a single British author counts the same as four books by s single German author. And thats not what my library looks like.

But that's what your authors look like. Imagine it as a group photo of all the authors you've got books by. Anyway, I definitely prefer it this way.

>297, 298 I like it this way too. I know it isn't quite the same thing, but you do see the numbers of books in various languages in your Library Statistics now. The original language is what you are after, I guess.

Unfortunately in my library rather less than half of the books have an allocated original language. That has given me a nudge towards making sure that box is completed when I enter or edit a book.

I think it would make sense to provide a toggle. It's being considered. We want to redo the graph in a variety of ways--particularly by providing a map, not just a pie.

299

Should there be an original language graph, also?

Speaking of the language stat, I have seven books that are listed in my stats as having the language of the book as (xxx). (Not the original language. I have looked at those books, and the entries all say English. But the stats read as (xxx). I even went in and did a group change to English, but the stats still say (xxx). Suggestions?

WLFobe, see this thread, msg 16 in particular:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/99519

I have been slowly working on my authors in the "Not Set" list and I can tell that other people are working on them also, my total not set is coming down faster than just what I do. I was getting frustrated because every few days I would find myself checking the same names that I could not assign a nation because of multiple authors listed under their common name. I have started assigning "multiple persons" to these partly so I don't keep wasting time going back to the same names over and over.

It will also let me see how many authors I have sharing names.

So I've got an difficult case and wondered what I should do with it. Helen Zimmern was born in Germany, moved to UK at 4 and became British by nationality, translated quite a few German works into English early in her career and then wrote a couple of books, moved to Switzerland for a good few years to do some more notable translations, then spent the last 40 years of her long life in Italy where she wrote her most notable works.

By birth she is German. By nationality she is British. At the time of her death she had been in Italy for nearly half her life and therefore probably held Italian nationality. How to prioritise which of these shows up for the categorisation?

You could easily reflect all this information in three lines of 'Nationality' -
German (birth)
UK (naturalisation)
Italy (domicile)

If she became an Italian citizen, then swop 'naturalisation' for 'domicile'

I think, without being certain, that the last line is the one adopted for Map the Author but in this case I would accept her choice of country, whatever her passport, and put 'Italy' in the map field.

#305: By birth she is German. By nationality she is British. At the time of her death she had been in Italy for nearly half her life and therefore probably held Italian nationality. How to prioritise which of these shows up for the categorisation?

What did she call herself? I would call Nabokov American, because even in the final years of his life he spent in Zurich, he paid American income tax and identified himself as American.

Which gets you to the question of Trotsky - Ukrainian by birth, Russian by choice. A anti-nationalist, he rejected the concept of an independant Ukraine. He considered himself Russian right up to his death in Mexico (at the hands of a Russian agent).

And the man who gave the orders - Stalin. Georgian by birth, Russian by choice, reclaimed by his homeland posthumously.

306

Before I read your post, I had been leaving nationality blank when doing CK on an author about whose nationality I was unsure. It is not easy to find out the nationality of an author who moves as an adult, as sources can be somewhat skimpy.

There are, of course, all sorts of reasons for retaining or adopting a nationality. As I understand it, if Nabokov wanted to keep a US passport, Uncle Sam would expect taxes wherever he was living. UK subjects can avoid UK income tax if they stay away for long enough. With the establishment of the European Union, there are fewer reasons than before to change nationality if you live in one EU country with the passport of another.

As far as mapping is concerned, I would put Nabokov in the USA, Trotsky in the Ukraine and Stalin in Georgia, the latter two on the basis that these are the present day countries from whence they came. For nationalities, both are Russian, Stalin certainly from the USSR, Trotsky probably the same.

It seems that someone is playing with a map...

#311
It seems that someone is playing with a map...

And funnily enough, when the map field specifically says A currently existing, generally recognized country we can map against, one of the four 'countries' on the experimental map is not a currently existing country at all!

(I think that Great Britain on the map actually has a tiny blob beside it which is Northern Ireland, so I suppose it really is the UK.)

And the Sudan will soon be two countries.

I miss the pie chart and the lists of names that I was slowly working through during my down time.

Of course, Tim has had something else on his mind - http://www.librarything.com/topic/107962 - not to mention the dog!

Yes, and this was probably one of the hundreds of other things that the new set up broke. Only temporarily I am sure and when it is fixed I can revisit all those "multiple persons"

I don't particularly want to add a dampner to this but . . . . Some of us (Scots) are democrats and have not followed the Irish example of the last century by raising arms. We are proud of our heritage and display our displeasure and strive for freedom through the ballot box instead. That does not mean we consider ourselves UK citizens or 'British.' I am a Scot. On all official council paperwork, etc. that requires me to state my nationallity I put, "Scottish/Scots" whichever choice is available.

As was mentioned above, the term 'British' is used in ignorance by a lot of people as a euphamism for 'English'. Many of us would most certainly be offended by Scots authors being labelled as "English or British because those doing the labelling think it's all the same thing!" It most certainly is not!

There also appears to be considerable confusion amongst contributors (above) about some very basic facts. It is stated (posts 42 and 146) that nationality and ethnicity were the same thing/nationality and citizenship are the same thing. This is nonsense! In this country (Scotland) we have Scots of Norman and English descent, Scots of Norse (or Viking) descent in the northern isles, many Scots of Irish descent in the lowlands and many Scots of Celtic descent particularly in the west highlands and islands. The nationality of all is Scots, the ethnicities are different, equally valid but different. My own ethnicity is Celtic (a Gael, my language is Gaelic) my nationality is Scots. Now-a-days there are also many proud Scots with different ethnicities who's forefathers came here from various parts of the British Empire. Ethnicity and Nationality are not the same!

Confusion of the terms 'country' and 'state' is rife. England is not a country and according to post , and hasn't been, apparently, since the act of union! Of course it is, as are the other countries which form constituent parts of the modern U.K. state.

The fact that the northern part of Ireland is part of the UK state in terms of it's political administration, does not somehow magically stop it from being one of the great Irish provinces. It is still part of Ireland! Ulstermen are UK citizens but that does not stop them being Irish (or European)!

There seems to be great confusion among those involved in this 'Nationality exercise.' The inability of those undertaking this exercise to get their facts right is rather annoying. Would US users be happy if the organisers of this decided that it was all too much bother to sort out US/Canadian nationality difficulties for some authors, to determine French/US difficulties (Louisiana), Mexican, Spanish etc. difficulties elsewhere and decided just to list all authors from that part of the world as 'North American.' I don't think so!

For many individual's their national identity is important to them. As far as this exercise is concerned, please get it right or don't do it!

The contributor who stated that he didn't mind the British Library being recorded as 'English' says it all (post 290)!

PS I don't mind the British Library being posted as Scottish!

PSS Yes I do!

In all seriousness, is this a worthwhile undertaking?

>316 That does not mean we consider ourselves UK citizens or 'British.' I am a Scot. On all official council paperwork, etc. that requires me to state my nationallity I put, "Scottish/Scots"

I've go no problems with UK subjects who see themselves primarily as Scots, Welsh, even Cornishmen or Liverpudlians but you all have to accept that, should you need one, you will carry a UK passport. Scotland, since the Act of Union is not an independent nation and won't be until Alex Salmond and his pals can get their way. In my book that makes the nationality of a post 1707 Scots author 'UK'. For pre 1707 Scots, 'Scotland' is accurate. As far as mapping is concerned, the plan seems to be to place authors in the present-day country containing the area in which they were born or flourished so that's 'UK' even for the old guys.

The real problem with your ideas is to know when to stop splitting into increasingly small groups, Bretons? Basques? Lapps?

I actually think the Irish Question is rather more interesting than that of the Scots. My father - certainly English - was born in Ireland early in the 20th C. when Ireland was under the English Crown. My sister (born in England) wanted to become an Irish Citizen. The Irish official of whom she enquired told her that, if her father was born in Ireland, she was Irish whether she liked it or not.

#316: Would US users be happy if the organisers of this decided that it was all too much bother to sort out US/Canadian nationality difficulties for some authors, to determine French/US difficulties (Louisiana), Mexican, Spanish etc. difficulties elsewhere and decided just to list all authors from that part of the world as 'North American.'

The simple fact is, no one is declaring that Hawaii is somehow part of Mexico, like you declare Northern Ireland not to be part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Scotland and Northern Ireland. I don't see any reason why we should define "nationality", as we use it, not to have a direct connection to nation-states. While the word has extended meaning, and sociologists can bat it around day after day, all using that extended means is that it's harder to impossible to resolve difficult questions.

315: Only temporarily I am sure and when it is fixed I can revisit all those "multiple persons"

In the meantime, you can search CK for "multiple persons":
http://www.librarything.com/commonknowledge/search.php?q=%22multiple%20persons%2...

#317: I actually think the Irish Question is rather more interesting than that of the Scots.

It's also more volatile. I'd be willing to label people as being from England, Scotland or Wales, if that was the consensus; it's a minor point. But if we don't do that, then people from Northern Ireland need to be UK, and if we do, they need to be Northern Ireland. At no point should we change the nationality of people from a place, especially since Ireland, the UK, and a majority of the population of Northern Ireland are fine with it being part of the UK.

>320 ....especially since Ireland, the UK, and a majority of the population of Northern Ireland are fine with it being part of the UK.

Bejasus! Be careful who you are saying that to! There are a lot of Irish, on both sides of the border, who are very keen on a united Ireland.

The really important question is how to solve the Texas problem.

#321: And? The Government of Ireland has accepted Northern Ireland as part of the UK. And the majority of the population of Northern Ireland wants it to be part of the UK. Nothing I said was false.

In any case, a lot of inhabitants of Northern Ireland don't want there to be a united Ireland, which is the very reason Northern Ireland exists and continues to exist. I fail to see why we should ignore their desires and political reality.

> 316: So if/when you travel, you don't use a UK passport? To my mind, this isn't about who or what you - or anybody else - would like to identify as.

I may or may not like that my nationality is Dutch. My family hails from Holland (no longer an independent state) and the former Dutch East Indies, not "the Netherlands". And I certainly don't like the fact that the Dutch Republic became a monarchy in 1813-1815.

But none of that changes the fact that my passport (citizenship) says "Kingdom of the Netherlands". And to my mind that's what the nationality field is for.

message 324 But none of that changes the fact that my passport (citizenship) says "Kingdom of the Netherlands". And to my mind that's what the nationality field is for.

Confusing issues again! Nationality has to do with your passport not your national identity! Did all those previously mentioned ancient (and not so ancient) writers carry passports? The rules of this debate seem to change to suit the outcome prefered by some. (Citizenship = nationality!!??)

Well, that's how I interpret it. The field says "nationality" (which essentially is a legal concept), not "national identity" (which is more a historical/anthropological concept). So, yes, to my mind nationality roughly equals citizenship. Let me put it another way: would you say an American of Scottish descent holds US or Scottish nationality?

Though I am what we (in Dutch) would call an "Indo", I would feel daft saying my nationality were "Dutch East Indian" for example. It doesn't define anything, except some happenstance detail about part of my family history.

Digression: As for earlier writers having passports - yes, many of them would have some such thing if they wished to travel. They wouldn't look anything like our modern passports of course. I've even seen lengthy handwritten ones in archives. But the basic idea is quite old.end digression

I fully understand there are other ways to look at this though. And I'm not laying down rules - just explaining how I see things and why. If we should reach a consencus to interpret this as you propose I would abide with that.

Go back to the OP - the CK nationality field has been around for ages and has been used in various ways by different people. What was new was a plan to display the information on a map. In practical terms this means deciding on a present-day country. OK, you can separate Scotland on a map relatively easily - and even Texas ;-) - but what about Lakota Sioux or Navajo? (Yes, there are authors on LT with these nationalities.)

>323 Hey, calm down. I take exception only to your use of the word 'fine' - there are many inhabitants of both 'nations' who are definitely NOT 'fine' about it. Indeed, one or two still shoot policemen and set off bombs to underline their feelings. I think you are ignoring the desires of many Irish.

> 327: Sure. And I absolutely don't mind seeing, for instance, both Scotland and UK listed on separate lines for that field. It does allow for that, and I would never delete such info if/when I encounter it.

What I do mind is the implication that since I see things differently I would be "doing it wrong".

My 2c: "Nationality" has at least two meanings. One, the legal concept, which refers to nationstates. Since by its very nature applying "nationality" to many authors is ahistorical, stick to a modern *definition* of nationality. The main problem here is contested nations, but set a standard -- UN recognition, I would propose. For historical entities if they qualify as "nations" under the modern definition, and are mappable with a 21st century map, then go for it.

The second definition refers more to ethnicity, language, and so forth. This definition is much less susceptible to a simple definition, and people can have multiple and overlapping nationalities. It's a form of "identity".

However, one might be able to accommodate both forms by a two-part rule: (1) Take the fuzzy definition of nationality (that would include Irish, etc.) if appropriate / known / taken *by* the author; (2) if not known or appropriate, use the legal definition.

Just FYI: I actually don't care, and I don't care about this field; I find "birthplace", "deathplace", "residency" maps interesting; so-called "nationality" doesn't do anything for me.

Does anyone have major objections to the existing compromise, which is:

"Nationality" is a free-form, multi-valued field. Put in "Scotland" and "UK", or "Northern Ireland" and "UK". Put in "Lakota Sioux" or "Roman Empire".

"Country for map" is a currently-existing, internationally-recognized country corresponding to the geographical region the person is most associated with. "UK", or "USA", or "Italy".

Edited to add key word.

Is the term "Nationality" too vague and should it be replace or further defined in CK? Replaced with Citizenship? Or should we add a term so that people could put down both if they are different? Heritage? Ethnicity? After all, what's one more data field if it makes people more comfortable?

I hate to refight half a dozen wars just when Europe seemed to be settling itself a bit.
Or maybe not?

k4k

Edited for multiple grammatical errors.

Nothing wrong with adding a "heritage" field. I certainly would need multiple entry there. But the current nationality field can have multiple entries, so there is room for both interpretations.

No worries, I'm not planning on going to war against Scotland ;-) It's just the "you're insulting me if you say I'm (also) a UK national" thing that I find bizarre. As I see it that's merely stating a legal fact.

Prior to the map idea (which I'd still like to see) I don't think there was much argument about the Nationality field. Folk used it as they thought appropriate. I really can't see what sensibilities will be damaged by the mapping, and we have a separate Country for map field for that.

#330 has it straight as far as I am concerned (is there an 'anyone' missing in the first line?)

I think Puerto Ricans carry a U.S. passport, but I can't imagine the majority of Puerto Ricans regarding USA as their nationality.

I didn't know that. Also I have to keep reminding myself that the UK gave its passport to all kinds of people who officially weren't UK citizens (in Hong Kong for instance). Silly usage, if you ask me (these documents do carry obligations for any state providing them too), but it's a fact nevertheless.

I guess there's no really good cover-it-all answer for these things. Maybe some people should simply also be entered as "UK (passport)", or USA (passport).

> 333: All I get from #330 is that lorax has problems with multiple values for that field - not why. Some people do legitimately have multiple nationalities - even in the legal sense.

330, 335 - I think she left out a word: maybe it was "Does anyone have objections...."

I don't have objections to that compromise. It allows multiple values, and allows us to list the person's actual nationality at their own time in one field, and the current location of that nationality in another.

Especially given that "country for mapping" helps us group together people at that level, I'd be fine if people stop listing "Scotland, UK" or "UK" in the nationality field for some Scots, and just list Scotland, even for contemporary and post-Act-of-Union authors.

PS - I do miss the pie chart and list of authors, though. I hope those aren't going away permanently. Maybe the map can get it's own meme?

I do miss the pie chart and list of authors, though. I hope those aren't going away permanently. Maybe the map can get it's own meme?

Yes. Patiently waiting because I assume this to be a transition phase, but something like that would be great.

We've put the chart back up for the moment; the map will be back, at some point (probably with the chart as well).

Thank you. If that includes the lists that should also help in finding those split authors (n/a and multiple persons) that need to be adjusted in light the new "split personality" thingy.

But don't get me wrong - I will love the map if/when...

I wonder if just renaming "Nationality" to "National Identity" would allow the fuzziness and historical quirks while still allowing things like modern definitions based on passport and citizenship (including dual/multiple). As mentioned before, you can list multiple ones. So:

Albert Einstein:

Württemberg/Germany (citizenship until 1896)
Stateless (citizenship 1896–1901)
Switzerland (citizenship from 1901)
Austria (citizenship 1911–12)
Germany (citizenship 1914–33)
United States (citizenship from 1940)

Bobby Fischer

United States (citizenship, renounced 2004)
Iceland (citizenship 2005)

Leon Trotsky

Russian Empire (modern Ukraine, birth)
Soviet Union
Mexico (exile)

None of the above information is supposed to be completely accurate, as I just wanted to come up with some examples. I cribbed a bit from wikipedia and the comments from people earlier in the thread.

Of course, you could do this with it named "Nationality", but that seems to make it more of a misnomer when used in this way. I can see that "National Identity" might still be problematic for some people in some cases, but I think there is no perfect answer and this might possibly be the least bad solution.

And then you have the fact that this is all just a discussion about the English term. :D

#327: What ever goes on before, the last line of any Nationality field needs to be a real nation-state they lived in or had citizenship in, so the graph we're talking about is coherent, not a mess of Erdőslando, Bremen, North Scotland, Celtic, Puerto Rico etc.

In the modern day, Lakota is only a nationality by a stretch of the term. They're American citizens. They may be a race, a culture, but they have about as much sovereignty as a US state, maybe less.

And of course, while the Lakota live on a dozen reservations, the Navaho are trivial to separate on a map, given the (one) Navaho reservation is a nearly contiguous area in northern Arizona and surrounding the Four Corners.

I think polls have shown that you are ignoring the desires of the majority of Northern Irish who desire to part of the UK. I think you're being horribly insensitive to many of the people in Northern Ireland to labeled them of Irish nationality; if they wanted to be Irish, they could be.

#341
"they have about as much sovereignty as a US state, maybe less." US states cannot make international treaties. The Seneca Nation has a treaty with the UK that predates the United States.

States cannot sue the federal government in international court. The Western Shoshone did just that, and won. Unfortunately, the federal government told them the same thing President Jackson said when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Cherokee. Let them enforce it.

The First Nations are nations just as Luxembourg, Monaco, and the Netherlands are. Independent but powerless. (no offense meant by that)

341> What ever goes on before, the last line of any Nationality field needs to be a real nation-state they lived in or had citizenship in, so the graph we're talking about is coherent, not a mess of Erdőslando, Bremen, North Scotland, Celtic, Puerto Rico etc.

That's why Tim added the Country for Map field. It doesn't use the last line of the Nationality field for that anymore.

That's why Tim added the Country for Map field. It doesn't use the last line of the Nationality field for that anymore.

I think it does, but only if there's nothing in the Country for Map field.

338 - Thanks!

Getting the list back would be great, too, and very helpful for correcting and adding CK.

> 342: No offense taken. The Dutch Republic may have been a world power centuries ago, but the current "Kingdom of the Netherlands" certainly isn't.

(In fact, even the current attempts of our political leaders just to be allowed into the presence of "the big boys" is pathetic - for example by sending Dutch troops to Afghanistan again and again, but no longer being able to supply them with ammo, spare parts for equipment, or even boots. Ex-military talking).

344: it does, but only if there's nothing in the Country for Map field.

Even stronger, the help text says "This field is only necessary if the last entry in "Nationality" is not one." So, if the last entry in Nationality is a mappable country, there's no need to fill in the Country for Map field.

#342: The Seneca Nation has a treaty with the UK that predates the United States.

Hawaii, Scotland, and Danzig probably all have such treaties, and they're all moot.

The First Nations are nations just as Luxembourg, Monaco, and the Netherlands are.

Do they have embassies? Do they have representation in the UN? If Monaco didn't have either, I wouldn't consider them a nation-state. They haven't claimed independence from the US, either.

#343: That's why Tim added the Country for Map field. It doesn't use the last line of the Nationality field for that anymore.

I'm talking about the graph (the one at the top of this page), not the map. Splitting authors between UK, England, Cornwall and London is not helpful. The difference between the Map and the Graph is that the graph has the correct nationality, and the map has the current version.

To me, the pie chart is a bit pointless in light of all these complexities. It's been pretty well recognized that nationality/nation identity isn't a single valued field. Why make a pie chart when each author can be in the pie more than once?

348>

They haven't claimed independence from the US, either.

The Lakota did, actually, a few years ago. It was a publicity stunt and got no international recognition, but if that's your criterion, it doesn't apply in that case.

I'm pretty sure Luxembourg, Monaco, and the Netherlands are - at least formally - independent from the US too. ;-)

This is written from the US government's perspective, but might still be of interest on the question of Native American nations:

http://www.america.gov/st/peopleplace-english/2008/October/20061103120126cjsamoh...

More generally, nation (with nationality) does not necessarily mean nation-state (with citizenship). Most obviously, there are multi-national states. But there are other conceptual and historical differences that matter. I know we've had a long discussion on all this before.

For the purposes of LT, however, I think the current solution, with 2 fields, works fine. If no currently-recognized-by-the-international-community nation-state fits the bill for an author (either because of time period or some other reason), we don't need to list it in the nationality field. But we can list that current nation-state in the mapping field.

347> Even stronger, the help text says "This field is only necessary if the last entry in "Nationality" is not one." So, if the last entry in Nationality is a mappable country, there's no need to fill in the Country for Map field.

That's just bone-headed. Anyone can come along and add something after the last entry in Nationality and not realize that they are having an effect on the Nationality map. It's safer just to enter the correct value in the Country for Map field even if it is a duplicate. That text should be changed.

348> I'm talking about the graph (the one at the top of this page), not the map. Splitting authors between UK, England, Cornwall and London is not helpful. The difference between the Map and the Graph is that the graph has the correct nationality, and the map has the current version.

My understanding is that the map is going to take the place of the graph. They only restored the graph temporarily because the map wasn't working and they didn't have time to deal with it.

>353 They only restored the graph temporarily because the map wasn't working and they didn't have time to deal with it.
You may be right but it's not what message 338 says.

>341 I should know better than to get into arguments on line with people who believe that they are always right, particularly about Ireland, but I do object to misrepresentation of what I have written.

I am NOT, as you put it ......ignoring the desires of the majority of Northern Irish who desire to part of the UK, merely pointing out that there are many Republicans living in Nothern Ireland who would prefer unification. Equally I am NOT .....being horribly insensitive to many of the people in Northern Ireland to labeled them of Irish nationality: As far as I know I have never labelled anyone thus.

That's all I have to say on the subject. I expect you'll want the last word.

354> You mean this part, (probably with the chart as well).

I'd forgotten that part, but I read it as presenting the same data (the Country for Map field) in different ways.

>356 Yes, that's probably more likely - even if less fun ;-)

Yes, fine, okay. But can we please agree that "country on the map" doesn't necessarily confirm to "nationality". Very different things for many people. Personally I have lived in the Netherlands, Australia, France, Italy, Ireland, the UK, and the USA, But my nationalty was always Dutch.

#355: You're the one who jumped me for making the entirely true statement of "especially since Ireland, the UK, and a majority of the population of Northern Ireland are fine with it being part of the UK."

As far as I know I have never labelled anyone thus.

You're right, it was writer1314 who said that Northern Irish were Irish. I'm sorry I got you confused.

I expect you'll want the last word.

After a hostile statement where you try and shame me into giving up my right of response instead of doing the dignified thing and walking away? You're damn right.

Ha, I get the last word.

I've decided that it's going to be "teacup".

P.S. Please don't post after this anyone, you'll ruin the context. Thanks.

teacup.

Well that just killed this thread!

Damn! Sorry MrA.

What if everybody does this...

teacup

#360 Just face it, it's never going to happen.

Might I compare ye all to Nazis, just to round things off?

Then we can continue the discussion of Nationality, but I suspect it means so many things that perhaps we had better first discuss what the field should be, and after that try to decide on the name of it.

message 359 is misunderstanding my meaning or misrepresenting what I said in my earlier post (316). I wrote,"The fact that the northern part of Ireland is part of the UK state in terms of it's political administration, does not somehow magically stop it from being one of the great Irish provinces. It is still part of Ireland! Ulstermen are UK citizens but that does not stop them being Irish (or European)!" Which basically means that someone born in Europe is European, someone born on Hawaii is Hawaiian, someone born on the island of Ireland is Irish, but if born in Ulster is also a UK citizen.

My original point was that I accept that my own Citizenship is UK, but my Nationality is Scots and my Ethnicity is Celtic. Too many people here are assuming that these terms are all the same and interchangable. They are not! Nationality should not be used as a label unless it means Nationality! I appreciate that many Americans can struggle to understand this, when for them the USA was never a nation state but a "new land," a new democratic state, peopled by many nationalities and ethnicities.

I repeat, my nationality is not UK, nor was that of Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, etc. etc. "Nationality" should not be used as a label unless it means Nationality! Use "Citizenship" if that's what is meant and use "Ethnicity" if that's what's meant!

Nationality should not be used as a label unless it means Nationality!

Stop blaming people for the fact that the word has more than one meaning.

nationality noun
• the official right to belong to a particular country
• a group of people of the same race, religion, traditions, etc

(source: http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/nationality)

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you... Oh wait, it does.

>366 Hence my suggestion in 331:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/104017#2477063

But I am OK with whatever is OK for who ever (whomever?).

Oh...and teacup to you too, MrAndrew!

Go teacup yourself.

What about coffee cups?

If you click the red X on this thread, will it still teacup?

That which we call a rose
by any other name would smell as teacup.

Does this solve the British Question?

(teacup)

Well, yes and no. Yes, because it's clear we should all give up now. No, because it's incomprehensible, but at least 2 people will claim to understand it and they will both be wrong.

As a citizen of the USA, famous for its poor knowledge of both history and geography, I say:
Teacup

Considering how many headaches the British Empire caused during its imperialist binge, it's perhaps just desserts that they must now face headaches regarding self-identity.

>373 He was speaking very quickly so I may have missed it, but I think he missed out Mozambique and Rwanda from the Commonwealth. Possibly also India Pakistan and Bangladesh. Why Mozambique, you may ask? One of the bits of Africa snaffled by Portugal rather than Great Britain and always noted for rather pretty postage stamps, they seem to feel that they missed out on something so applied for membership without being a colony first. The Commonwealth suspended the frightful Robert Mugabe and Zimbabwe but then he took the initiative and resigned. The Republic of Ireland is NOT a member.

That apart, this was a good summary. Rule Britannia!

#373
Considering how short it was, he made a surprising number of mistakes.

Ireland is not a country. Like Great Britain, it is a geographical not a political term. Dead wrong. The name of the country is Ireland; The Republic of Ireland is a descriptive term, not the official name.

When people say they are Irish, they are referring to the Republic of Ireland. Oh dear.

I may be wrong, but I thought that the name of that republic was actually Éire?

ETA: Wikipedia says that:
Article 4 of the Irish constitution adopted in 1937 provides that: "The name of the state is Éire, or, in the English language, Ireland." The Constitution's English-language preamble also described the population as "We, the people of Éire". The Republic of Ireland Act enacted in 1948 makes clear that the "Republic of Ireland" is a description and not a name of the state. Ireland (in English) and Éire (in Irish) remain its two official names.

> 374: If there are two people claiming to understand all of this: I'm not one. This thread certainly convinced me that my interpretation - originally - was too narrow. That doesn't really change anything, because I wasn't removing info like "Wales" and "Scotland" from the nationality field anyway.

In practice : I'm not going to bother though to check if a UK author happens to Welsh, Scottish, English, (Northern) Irish, Manx, or whatever.

And from here on I'm choosing the teacup too.

I'm glad to see the pie chart back while the issues with the map are being worked out, but I miss having the list of countries underneath. Especially as the majority of the countries for me are too small and combine to "other". And I was having fun going through the list of authors without nationality information and filling that in, often finding other fun CK facts about the author along the way.

For the record, the second largest country on my pie chart should, apparently, be named teacup.

Another vote for the return of the list so we can see the blank nationality authors and fix them! I sometimes go back thru my male/female and dead/alive lists to see if any newly added authors need more CK info. (or if Jim Butcher mysteriously lost his CK info again wtf??!!?) Be nice to add Nationality list to that as well.

Yes, that list was useful.

This week-end was the first time I decided to use the nationalities feature: I wanted to check the Pakistani authors in my library. I was disapointed to find out that the list disapeared. Hope it will come back soon...

Another call for the list.. I reeeaaally want to fill in the unidentifieds. Any word on that? Pretty please?

I have a word: teacup.

Well, I do like tea! *Sips green tea* (From a teacup)

Tea is great. But I I still would love to see that list back.

Whats up teacup?

Is that the teacup "Sir Arthur Eddington" posited?

It can't be. That one got broken. Somebody shot it with an arrow.

Russell's teapot is still out there though.

Thanks Jim,

I was just thinking of the "Eddington number", as one does on a Lazy friday in March, in Melbourne.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_number

Of course it was that old curmudgeon "bertie" ;-)

Is this feature ever going to be more than just a pie chart with no lists of authors?

Two weeks...

Tim and I were just talking about this yesterday; we hope to have it back up and running (with list, &c.) soon.

Don't forget the Texas problem!

Texas is to big a problem for one internet company to solve.

Texas is too big a problem to solve.

>396-397
Isn't/wasn't one of that state's catch phrases "everything's bigger in Texas"?
;)

Return Texas to Mexico!

Problem solved.

398> Also, "Texas - It's like a whole other country."

400> It is not "like" a whole other country, it is a whole other country. We even have our own national beer. "To drink anything else would be treason."

That's not beer. This is beer... http://www.christianmoerlein.com/main.html

I see Texas's governor is asking for Federal aid. I thought they were going to secede again, but now they want Federal money

i feel that "UK" should not be used as a country, because then Bob Dylan and Shakespeare fall under one, yet Bob Dylan is/was Welsh though his works in later years was USA, and Shakespeare is definately English. Nationality born and Nationality adopted is also contentious. Take some authors born in Russia, yet produced works in England. Difficult issue .

Derek T. Rowswell

>404 Given the (only slightly) ill-tempered discussion of this issue 50 or so posts back, I think you could be thought deliberately provocative ;-)

You can't dispense with the United Kingdom as a country for nationality purposes because, since the Act of Union, it is what it is. Evelyn Waugh, say, a very English author, had UK nationality. But Bob Dylan?? I think you'll find that the great Robert Allen Zimmerman was born in Duluth, Minnesota.

405: I think he's talking about Dylan Thomas, whoever he was. The man ain't got no culture! (No insult intended here at all -- this is a reference to Simon and Garfunkel :-)

>406 I think you're right. I just couldn't stop myself ;-)

>404 I've always thought Shakespeare was better in the original Russian.

#408 Possible Star Trek reference?

how long will it take to finish ?

>409 Quoting Nabokov, which Star Trek references.

Weird. My graph is now showing sections for both "UK" and "England, UK." I'm certain the UK section, which is quite large, includes England as well as Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, so why is there that little bit all on its ownsome for only England?

412 - The problem is likely that someone has entered "England, UK" for one of your authors instead of UK in the common knowledge nationality field.

412 - update: I fixed a few of these entries last night, and I think that also fixed your graph.

You mean the feature is working? I have not seen anything but the same pie chart in months.

Sorry, no, I meant pie chart when I said graph. Unfortunately, all that's there is the pie chart. The list of authors is still gone, and there's still no map.

The pie chart, however, is sensitive to changes in the data. So if someone went and changed all your authors with "USA" as the nationality to "Middle earth" nationality, you'd see that in the pie chart. I corrected some CK entries, which got rid of the extraneous "England, UK" wedge in Her_Royal_Orangeness's pie chart.

To bad, I was enjoying working with the data. I have my unknowns in Male/Female down below 10 and would like to work on this. I know, I need a life.

#417 - Maybe you could work on the Texas problem.

I am all for giving it back to Mexico if that is what you mean.

Thanks rsterling! My pie is now groovy. :)

Any updates? All I have is a pie chart now, that no longer shows percents.

I am grateful for all the work going into this!! :) :)

Bueller.... Bueller... ?

Chicago, Illinois, USA

Day(ssssssssssssssss) Off

"The Sausage King of Chicago?"

Is this feature ever going to stop sucking?

Does not seem to have percents now... I can't wait until this is set up again and we can see which books need nationality information added! (Or at least the percents are back).

Any updates to share?

Thanks for the work! :)

This won't work right until the Texas problem is solved.

Why I'm sure, we in Australia, have enough space to park Texas for a while.
Lets see, West Australia, Queensland...

Yep, plenty of space.

I'm sure some of our larger "stations" wouldn't mind another "back paddock".

#430 by guido47> Nah, we'll just park it in Alaska and still have room for another one and a half Texases. ;)

Wasn't that the original Klingon?

Shakespeare, I mean (in the original Klingon).

It would be nice to see some numbers with the pie chart. How do my Austrian or German authors compare?

http://www.librarything.com/profile/MarthaJeanne/stats/nationality

434

I agee - would like to see some more activity on this.

Third this!

Which raises another question: what ever happened with the suggestion that we be able to use "Klingon" as a language option? Not to translate the site, but to be able to indicate that Klingon is the language of books like The Klingon Dictionary?

You've reached the LT graveyard, where new ideas go to die after partial development.

This will probably be finished "in two weeks." (Which translates to don't expect it before two years.)

The thing about the maps - which I had suggested in a previous thread before this one, incidentally - is that the same API that they're using for the charts does maps, too. It's probably a two-line change, unless the error handling for non-existent country names in Google's API is crummy, in which case they need to add a join to a clean list first.

Edited to add: I went and poked at the API, and it fails very gracefully for something like Tim's "Roman Empire" data -- it just doesn't plot if the name doesn't conform to a currently existing country. And it appears that they'd just need to swap out the names of the visualizations that they're calling.

Tim, if you don't want to do this, can you at least give us the full list of our author nationality counts that get summed up by the graphic -- 500 US, 300 UK, and so on -- and anyone who wants can go take five minutes and make our own map?

#437: Note that this is not adding a special case; merely updating to the latest ISO 639-2 list (the list of languages LT uses) would do so.

Or at least giving us the list so we can check our author data and add to CK!

Bump. Any chance of getting either the list of authors-by-nationality that was present in the first version, or a map in addition to or instead of the pie chart? Or even the raw counts for each nationality, and the data geeks among us can go to the API and make our own map?

Thanks, I'd been meaning to bump this too. It's on Tim's "big board of things Jeremy bugs him about" :-)

#444

DANG! Is the board the size of a room wall?

It's next to the life-size map of the world.

Map version would be great!

447> ...but if the map and/or pie are too hard, just the list would be very nice.

Dump the whole thing for all the reasons cited above, but also as an affront to logic in its confusion of the published origin of the work (which is empirical and demonstrable) with the nationality of the author, which can be multiple or changing, even during the creation of a specific work. To cite only one obvious exmaple, what does one do with Wagner's RING DES NIBELUNGEN? Saxon, because of Wagner's citizenship by birth (there being no Germany at the time)? Swiss, because of his place of exile during at-least half its composition? Bavarian, because of defacto citizenship after exile? German, because completed cycle appeared first after the proclamation of the German Empire? Ditto for Dante and the Comedy. And my dear friends, what about the Christian Bible, or the Torah, or the Talmud? I can't believe I even dignified this silly discussion by taking time to write.

>449 by HarryMacDonald, Then why did you??

> 449: Grow a sense of humour. It isn't called "fun statistics" for nothing. Anyway: that's why we have "nationality" and "country for the map" separately (both of which can have more than one answer by the way). So, to use one of your examples, you can enter "Saxony" and "Bavaria" and "Switzerland" and "Germany" for the nationality of Wagner. (Personally I wouldn't use "Switzerland", since he only resided there).

Also nobody claimed this would say anything about the origins of any "work". So who's muddying the issue here?

Personally I happen to think it's interesting trivia that, for example, Augustinus of Hippo (Saint Augustine if you prefer) was a Roman citizen but lived in what we now call Algeria. You don't like such trivia? Fine. Simply ignore the feature.

I thought trolls were supposed to be anonymous.

452 > http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/nov/09/confessions-of-an-internet-tr...

Please, just go away already.

451>

I suspect he didn't read far enough down the thread to see that part of things. (Also, he seems to be a bit of a crank.)

Admitting that I didn't read all 455 comments above, but when I look at my stats, I don't see the breakdown for each Nationality shown in the illustration at the top of this page. (where the USA authors are listed) Is there some way to easily see the list form of what is being put into each category (for ease of checking and editing)?

Can't evaluate usefulness in current form . . . not sure how inaccurate the data might be without looking book-by-book.

I also find "Nationality" to be a problematic concept . . . as I would "ethnicity" "race" . . .
I'm pretty sure this topic has been discussed at length in the past . . . my main issue is "Who are we to decide on someone else's nationality?" "How do you know/decide?" "What source will be definitive, or we have the usual editing battles ending in 'majority rules'"?

As an Italian-American (whose Italian relatives fled to Switzerland but never considered themselves "Swiss") with a Dutch last name, red hair, and blue eyes this whole issue raises all kinds of red flags.

To quote Virginia Woolf: “As a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.” Three Guineas

I would call that "heritage". To me "nationality" is more a legal thing. What does / would it say on the passport? But I get it.

Oh, and, yeah. The feature doesn't actually function very well yet. That list used to show, at the very beginning, but it was disabled (can't recall why - maybe I never knew).

But we don't have "legal" data. In most cases we have people guessing and entering what they think is maybe accurate as data. What are they basing these entries on? Birth certificates? Histories of residence? doubtful.

What is this telling us about books/writers unless the parameters are better defined?

A "legal" definition of my grandparents "Nationality" would have been "born in Switzerland, raised in United States" . . . but that would be a gross misrepresentation of their own understanding of their "Nationality" because it doesn't recognize that their parents (my great-grandparents) were originally Italians.

And the mapping of old locations onto new locations adds even more problems. See comment above about reclassifying Native American writers . . . are LTers really going to reclassify "Turtle Mountain Chippewa" as "USA" and leave it at that? . . .

I suppose I should be relieved that my Italian relatives weren't writers . . . they worked in the silk factories of Northern New Jersey . . . I just used them to illustrate a problem . . .

and yes I know that many LTers don't care about accuracy/details and see this feature as "fun" . . . I just don't look forward to the mess they will make of the CK data associated with my books . . . *sigh*

Tim has expressed that "nationality" is not ethnicity, but is what would be on your passport. You can also use the "country (for map)" field in CK for people who are citizens of one country but strongly identified as residents of another country. As the "for map" suggests, the idea is more about global mapping than ethnic analysis at the level of "Turtle Mountain Chippewa" vs. "USA."

Many LTers care passionately about the accuracy of these details, and do serious research before making CK entries. (This is what OCD people do for "fun.") And of course, if you regard an entry as inaccurate, you are free to change it. We are all librarians here.

459: If you don't like it, don't use it. This data never migrates away from LT and the only interesting thing about it is the aggregated statistics, which will be roughly correct even if there are occasional errors. This is a small piece of trivia.

Here is my tuppence worth.
I have been doing a large amount of CK as regards 19th century scientists. Many are born pre 1871, the date of German Unification, thus although born in what we know today as Germany, it may be Bavaria or Prussia. However as they grew older they may have become Germans. I tend to put Germany as nationality although under birth place, the city should in fact not be in Germany as it never existed. Same goes for Italy. Although looking at Birthplace you rarely get the place name as just Papal States or Kingdom of Naples.

Nationality is rather complex. Many British citizens emigrated to the Empire and never took out the citizenship of their adopted countries. I know this as a fact as I live in South Africa and know many Brits who refused to give up their citizenship. So I have found a few palaeontologists that lived in South Africa that are for all intents and purposes South African but consider themselves British.
The USA is a different kettle of fish. Many new USA immigrants want US citizenship as soon as it becomes available and take it up. Should their nationality be USA or only country for map be USA?

In cases such as USA immigrants I would use the possibility of multiple entries. For example:

Nationality:
Germany * (birth)
USA (naturalized)

* or whatever other country of origins

It's moving further from usual concepts of nationality, but, as bergs47 writes, you may need personal acquaintance to be certain what an immigrant has chosen as their 'passport nationality': in the example in #463 'USA (residence)' may be all one can enter with any certainty.

And, of course, we already have a CK field for residence.

Yes, I would only use that "USA (naturalized)" thing if I knew for sure.

I think the European situation is much more complex. Both the 19th century and late 20th have changed the map of Europe dramatically. Should all 37 authors whose nationality is listed as Yugoslavia be changed?

Well, their country on the map should be.

If my memory serves me well, when the map idea was first floated Tim indicated that an entry for 'country' should be a country that is shown on a current map so from that point of view the Yugoslavs should be changed - shame we haven't got a map ;-(

Perhaps we all have our own ideas as to the appropriate nationality for writers. I think of T. S. Eliot as British but then I think of W. H. Auden as British, too. Irrational?