Help Page for Relationships

Feel free to come over to the HelpThing page for work-to-work relationships and help out with definitions/examples. Let us know which section you'd like to work on, to avoid accidental edit wars.

Thanks!

Meanwhile, I need lunch. Back in a few :-)

Forgot to add, feel free to discuss questions/concerns/edge cases here.

Is there any way to 'star' or 'watch' a frequently accessed wiki page for easier reference? (Ok, so I can bookmark it, but it doesn't help when I'm using a different computer).

>4 editfish:
In the upper right-hand corner, click on 'watch.'

This point has been raised in the longer thread but perhaps lost in the noise: None of the available categories is useful for works that include excerpts from (or a excerpted in) other works.

Give me an example? Sorry if I missed it over there, but let's do hash this out.

It seems that for each pair of works there can only be one relationship specified. I discovered this in connection with The Law Is for All, a book which consists primarily of an exegetical commentary on Liber AL vel Legis, but which also includes a complete edition of the latter. Forced to choose, I went with commentary on, as reflecting the specific reason for inclusion and also being an instance of a rarer phenomenon for this text (commentary v. simple inclusion). Still, in a perfect world, I'd like to be able to see The Law Is for All also in the list of books that include Liber AL vel Legis.

>8 paradoxosalpha: - you should be able to add that, you just have to search again (you can't add more than one at a time)

>5 DaynaRT: thank you. For some reason I was expecting it to be laid out similar to the group setting. Just need to pay close attention, I guess. :D

>6 TomVeal: & 7 If I understand it properly, I think an example of an excerpt might be a passage or chapter of a book included in an English Literature book? As such it would not count as a work-to-work relationship.

>7 jbd1:
Johnson's dictionary and such books contains excerpts from A dictionary of the English language, and I would not say that "contained in" is an adequate way of characterising the relationship.

Would a glossary/index published by a different author be a supplement?

I'm thinking of how The Complete Guide to Middle-Earth should relate to The Silmarillion, LotR, and The Hobbit.

>11 andejons: - That's an abridgment, I think.

>12 DaynaRT: - hmm, "supplement" or "study or guide to"? I'd be inclined to say the latter. Others?

>12 DaynaRT:

If it uses a glossary/dictionary/encyclopedia format, it might be a concordance.

Oh jeez - how did I completely overlook "study or guide to"?

eta: It uses a glossary format. There is very little commentary.

> 15

I would vote for concordance, then. That's what I used for The Vampire Companion and The Witches Companion, since what they do is list every person, place, and significant object in their respective series and say what it is and when it appeared, sometimes with a little background information.

Hmm. An awfully broad interpretation of concordance, I think.

Concordance is generally pretty specific: from OED "An alphabetical arrangement of the principal words contained in a book, with citations of the passages in which they occur."

These are fairly rare - I think the examples you give are much more guides than concordances, although I suppose using a very broad definition they could be both.

An "abridgement" is a shortened version of a book. An "excerpt" is a section of it that may or may not be representative of the whole. As an example, Folkways and Mores consists of several discrete chapters from William Graham Sumner's Folkways: A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals.

Maybe we need more categories, then, because I hesitate lumping them in with study guides, even though they don't completely fall into concordance either. I just finished putting all of CLAMP no Kiseki in, which are definitely "guides" (they include character biographies, chapter summaries, and publication histories, though they do NOT do it in any kind of index format).

Maybe we should ask for an "encyclopedia" category?

Another relationship that would be useful for SF and fantasy is "set in the same world as", which would cover the numerous "shared world" stories that aren't either prequels or sequels.

> 19 - "study or guide to" is not "study guide to" - it's a study of the work or a guide to the work. Those you give in #16 should fit fine there, no?

>20 TomVeal: - "inspired by," I think?

I'll go with study or guide to for now.

>19 lampbane:
Why not "companion to"? I also don't like concordance for all these companion books; frankly, a real concordance just tells you where to find every word in the book. It does not give you character bios or definitions.

Yeah I was thinking of "companion to" as well ...

I think a glossary-format volume works fine as a supplement to the original work.

I've added a comment to the main thread as well, just so we could get more input and maybe lighten the load over here.

I know "study or guide to" doesn't mean "study guide" but we're putting two things that should be different in the same category. I don't think an encyclopedia belongs in the same category as studies.

I'm willing to let "concordance" go but we still have votes for "study or guide," "companion to" and "supplement to."

When I think of "companion to", I think of something like Forever Peace being a companion piece to Forever War. It does not share characters or even the same universe, but Haldeman specifically said it was a "thematic sequel". Do other people really see studies and guides and such as being "companions"?

Shifting gears slightly, where do we put art books? I've tried "supplement" for now.

>29 lampbane:

Example?

One example is The Art of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire.

There are a ton of books dedicated to art for The Lord of the Rings. In my own library, I'm trying to figure out how to relate Dore's Illustrations for Rabelais to the original work.

Okay - I just talked to Tim. I think we'll separate out:

guide to -
study of - for non-textual studies of the work
companion to -

Now, somebody help us distinguish between guide to and companion to :-) Generally my thinking is that these works will explicitly say in the title that they are these (Guide to Middle Earth, The Witches Companion, &c.)

>29 lampbane: - example?

On excerpts.

I believe that "contains excerpts of" is a valid relationship.

I am thinking of a book which may contain excerpts of a number of other books. Abridged isn't the right term in those cases. The excerpts aren't trying to tell the whole story of the original book - they are just a chapter or so extracted verbatim.

>32 paradoxosalpha: - I think supplement, in that case. Ditto #31

33> I think my feeling about Forever Peace being a companion piece to Forever War goes against that theory.

I also wonder, is the inverse of "Is a companion piece to" going to be "Has a companion piece" or will it also be "Is a companion piece to"?

I'd think that Forever Peace was "inspired by" Forever War.

Only need examples for commentary, concordance, and teacher's guide now.

Right, so it's not "companion piece to" but "companion to" as in A companion to James Joyce's Ulysses to Ulysses. Maybe call it "reference companion to"? Would that clarify?

Companion piece to is a different (but possibly necessary) relationship.

Yeah I'm shocked at how hard teacher's guides are to find!

>30 Noisy:, 33

Dust Covers in its relationship to the Sandman series. It's a collection of the covers of each individual comic issue. The example given in 31 is also a valid example.

I'll move The Vampire Companion and Witches Companion if those divisions are made; however I now have a new question:

Haunted (the album by Poe) and House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski are both inspired by the same source material (a series of audio cassettes left by their father), so they're thematically linked (which is the only reason I put this one music CD in my LT collection). Would their relationship to each other be "companion to" or something else?

37> Inspired by doesn't seem right, either. I find the idea of one novel by a certain author inspiring another author by the same novel as just too watered down. You could say that about MOST works an author produces. You can certainly say it of most books produced in similar settings (every Lake Wobegon book by Keillor, for instance). So I'd rather not water it down and leave it for a work from Author A that inspired a work from author B.

39> Yeah, I think "reference companion to" is a lot more clear. Much better.

ETA: I'm not sure if "companion piece to" is necessary, and might be especially confusing if we have "reference companion to". Right now, the relationships between these two is being denoted by putting Forever Peace in the Forever War series as "Thematic Sequel". That kind of bugs me, though.

Concordance:
Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible
The Star Trek Concordance

Art books about a specific work seem to fit well in supplements, I really don't think there's a need to add a specific relationship for them. Others?

Ack. CDs? This is hard enough without CDs! ;-)

Um, let's see. Definitely not "companion to" as I've suggested using it in #39. I would again say inspired by, but since there's no single cataloged source, there may simply not be a perfect pigeonhole for that relationship.

>42 brightcopy: - I think that's right, thematic sequel.

May I interrupt with a question?

What does "(indirect)" following an entry in Work-to-Work Relationships mean? For an example, see Philip Roth: Novels & Stories, 1959-1962.

Hmm. Good question. I don't know. Will check with Tim.

"Thematic sequel" is getting awfully fine-grained. Soon we'll have such relationships as "expounds the ideas implicit in" for, say, C. S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength.

I'm still unclear on the difference between a study and a companion and a supplement. It would be useful if the help page specifically contrasted different categories.

> 46 It looks to me like it means that the current work contains a work which contains the indirect work. Like A contains B, B contains C, so A indirectly contains C.

Working on it. Trying to keep too many pieces of this going at once. Sorry all.

>48 TomVeal: - thematic sequel is in the series function for CK, we're not adding it as a relationship here.

I'm not seeing a clear difference between 'Guide' and 'Companion,' and I think your example about using it in the title falls apart pretty swiftly.

For example, The Dragonlover's Guide to Pern and The Vorkosigan Companion are almost exactly the same sort of book - a book which elaborates on the world in a series, talks about the characters, etc.

So are they companions - or guides?

47/50> I suggested in the other thread that it say "indirectly" instead of "indirect". That way you can read it like this and it actually make sense as a sentence:

The Lord of the Rings
Contains
The Ring Sets Out : Being the first book of The Lord of the Rings
(indirectly)

ETA: I feel like "thematic sequel" is an almost nonsensical term that was made up simply to allow that book to be included in the series that it has no business being in. :D
(yes, I know the term predated it, but I still feel it has very little objective meaning)

>53 Aerrin99: - I don't disagree.

How about "reference guide/companion to"?

>44 jbd1:

Sorry, I don't normally catalog CDs, it's just that I couldn't ignore the connection between the two works. I only list one other CD in my collection, Where's Neil When You Need Him?, which um, I guess I could add a bunch of "inspired by" connections to.

At least having all this stuff written down here means we can go back and fix them once everything's sorted out.

>56 lampbane: - Heh, I know, I was just teasing. It's been a long day (and to think I thought it was going to be a quiet one - HAH!).

> 55

Yes, I like 'reference guide/companion to' - or even just 'reference guide' is probably fine in my opinion. I don't know if it would confuse others though.

There's too much varied discussion here for me to keep track of it and I'm not sure that the New Features group is the right place for it. Could we get a new group for relationships (like there's one for CK and another for Series) and then have different threads for each kind of relationship or group of similar relationships. I see lots of problems here but I can't get my thoughts organized with the current way the discussion is organized.

Would reference guide/companion be distinct from study of?

>59 jjwilson61: That's a good idea.

>60 _Zoe_: - yes, I think so ...

New group is a good idea.

Agree that a reference guide/companion is different than a study, which would contain original analysis of the base work, not just explanatory material.

>20 TomVeal:
That should probably be done via Common Knowledge, not relations between books (you describe a many-to-many relationship, not a one-to-one).

Art books about a specific work seem to fit well in supplements, I really don't think there's a need to add a specific relationship for them. Others?

Maybe, maybe not. Currently - at least fot me as an art historian - this simply is too vague. Please explain what exactly you mean.

An art book about/related to a specific other work seems to supplement that work. I don't think we need a relationship category for "contains art related to", do you?

> 33: "study of" is for "non-textual studies"? why? is that a typo?

Well, we need to distinguish it from textual commentary.

I settled on supplement to for most of my illustrations-for-the-work books. But in the case of The Divine Comedy of William Blake it seemed more like an adaptation somehow.

Folks really want a new group for this? If so, I'll start it (but I can't promise I'm going to spend the rest of the evening starting threads :-)

71> I think either a new group is a good idea for relationship discussions in general, or it should be folded into the Common Knowledge, WikiThing, HelpThing group. "Common Knowledge, WikiThing, HelpThing, Relationships"?

If we do a new group: LibraryThing Relationship Advice?

:-)

Tolkien's Hobbit Postcard Book is currently inspired by The Hobbit

Is that the right relationship? Or should it be something different. To my mind it is more like an art book.

73> LOL

Seriously, though, if you are going with a new group, it might be good to think ahead and make something that could also hold discussions about expressions, publication lines, etc.

Yeah that's my thinking - I don't want to have to do it again in - two weeks - when we put out the next steps.

Another Hobbity question.

The Hobbit was adapted into a graphic novel which is OK - the graphic novel is a straight up adaptation of the original.

However the graphic novel is also published in three volumes (and catalogued as separate items) - so each volume is an adaptation of The Hobbit, but each part is only an adaptation of a part of the book. Each graphic novel volume can only have one relationship with the original Tolkien novel.

So how should this be handled?

76> The more I think about it, the more I wonder if it shouldn't be folded into the same group with the CK stuff. I think to most users who might be coming to the group for help about it, there's probably not going to be any mental difference between CK and Relationships. And it's not like the CK group is heavily trafficked (last messages: Wed, Sun, Feb 1, Jan 30, Jan 25, etc.).

They're really both about how to link works together. It feels like separating them out into CK and Relationships is an underlying implementation difference that shouldn't necessarily concern the users. Does that make sense?

It does to me. Any objection?

77> How about this. The full volumme The Hobbit: A Graphic Novel contains each of the three partial volumes. The full volumes would be Adapation of The Hobbit. Could the partial volumes get an indirect adaptation status like works with Contains? This wouldn't make sense for all relations, but I wonder if it would for some.

Speaking of The Hobbit, I've reported this bug:

http://www.librarything.com/topic/109825

>77 andyl:

I've actually encountered that partial thing several times, and I've just put each graphic novel as "adaptation of" since I figured the "volume 1, volume 2, volume 3" would make the partial aspect of it obvious.

Examples:

Batman: No Man's Land, an adaptation of Batman: No Man's Land volume 1-5

Train Man has been adapted into a) a three volume manga, b) a different three volume manga and c) another different, *single* volume manga. I do wish there were a way to group these together in relation to each other, properly, though.

Okay - new thread, with updated lists of relationships, principles, &c.

After conferring with Tim, we're not going to do a new group for this (at least not at the moment) lest it completely splinter the conversation.

> 78, 79

It already bugs me that so much stuff is folded into that CK group. I have very little interest in CK, but a lot of interest in HelpThing - it drives me nuts to have to watch a lot of unrelated stuff so I don't miss HelpThing things, but I do it.

More importantly, that /group/ has a lot of interest in CK and very little interest in HelpThing - it's rough to drum up interest and I've often wondered if it would be easier if people who were only interested in expanding help had a place to go.

Basically, I think it is useful to separate different things out - and this /is/ different - and because of the way Talk is filtered (your groups, etc), there is very little downside.

I'd much prefer to see it get its own group.

84> Understood, but it seems like maybe the better thing to do is splinter HelpThing and WikiThing off into THEIR own group, and put CK and Relationships (and Expressions?) together. (Granted, you could do this by moving CK out of the existing group, or moving HT and WT out of the existing group. I'm just talking about the end result, not the means.)

It's weird to me that CK be put together with those other things at all.

83> But the conversation *needs* to be splintered. There are at least a half dozen different sub-threads going on within this thread and it's very hard to keep track of.

k, I've got at least a draft definition up for each of the current relationship types. I know they're not perfect, so feel free to suggest wording changes, &c.

> 85 I agree. Wiki and HelpThing go together pretty well. CK does not. They're really different parts of the site and attract people with different interests. Relationships is similar to CK, but I still dunno about lumping it. When you lump too much, sometimes you get the same group of people trying to do a ton instead of attracting new groups of people who find and make their niche. The Major Voices are already established in old groups - new groups for major new features sort of give that feature room to attract its own subset of power users who love and build it. There is overlap, sure, but--

Of course, this may be moot given the discussion, but I think they're things to consider!

(Just passing by: noticed the title of the thread in All Topics and thought "You must be joking? Is Tim Spalding setting himself up as a marriage counsellor now?!")

Is there more support for the ideal of parsimony here, or for capturing any and all relationships that may pertain to a given work?

I accept that defining relationship types (existing and future) will be ongoing, but assume for the moment types are generally understood and widely accepted.

Generally I'm most concerned about identifying other works with a relationship to a given work in my library, and least with defining whether a specific relationship is an inspiration or an adaptation or whatnot. That way, I learn of works unknown to me, and can broaden my appreciation of works in my library. But I'm sure others disagree.

(I think this principle is valid primarily for external relationships and not for internal: what Zoe proposed* as Different Works as opposed to Various Forms of the same work.)

What do others think? This approach will guide my use of relationships, I'm wondering if it's applicable more generally.

* Here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/109828#2515077

>90 elenchus:

Okey, I posted here thinking of potential guidelines for the Wiki Help page, but the basic point came up in the Reboot thread referenced in my post, so I'll follow that for now.

Jeremy - What do you think about adding in the wording for the reverse linkage under each one? Like under "Contains", saying something about how "Is contained in" is what will show up on pages as the reverse of it. Make sense?

Yes, good idea! Feel free, and I'll add some too as I can.

If I add a "non-series prequel" connection to a work that is currently listed as being "inspired by", should I remove the now redundant "inspired by"?

Should the Help Thing page state explicitly that an "abridgement" is not the reverse relationship of an "expansion" (and v.v.) -- along with the reverse linkage wording proposed in 92?

94> I think so. It seems to me that most of the other relationships like retelling-of, adaptation-of, abridgement-of, and non-series prequel, among others are refinements of inspired-of and, as such, inspired-of would be redundant. I'd be in favor of LT automatically removing any existing inspired-of relationship if one of those is added.

95 > Abridgement and expansion *do* have correlative phrases; it's just that they're not correlates of each other.

"abridgement" should have language like: "X is an abridgement of Y"; "Y was abridged in X".

"expansion" language should be: "X is an expansion of Y"; "Y was expanded in X".

Page should reflect that.

Whew. I've done some pretty thorough updates to the page. I included descriptions of what the reciprocal wording is for each relationship, including an example showing that wording for each one. I edited some of the examples to remove invalid ones or to replace them with more straightforward ones. I included some explanation in abridgment/expansion about what the difference between the two is. I also included a screenshot to make it obvious which one is "Work A" and which is "Work B."

Well done! (and thanks!).

Hi!.

Someone linked "Els dimarts amb Morrie" by Mitch Albom (catalan version of "Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life's Greatest Lesson") as follows

"Els dimarts amb Morrie" is contained in

- Four Mysteries By Wilkie Collins (Arma Dale, The Moon Stone, No Name, The Woman in White, Four Volume Set) by Wilkie Collins

- The Law and the Lady/The Moonstone/The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

- Four Mysteries By Wilkie Collins (Arma Dale, The Moon Stone, No Name, The Woman in White, Four Volume Set)

I'm trying to fix the mistake but I can't edit the relationships. Please, any help?

>100 jmbadia:
I can't find what you're describing. Links would be helpful. Just copy the URLs from the address bar at the top of the browser and paste them into the message.

Searching for "Els dimarts amb Morrie" returns no results:
http://www.librarything.com/search.php?search=Els+dimarts+amb+Morrie&searcht...

And I don't see any bad relationships on the Wilkie Collins work pages (I combined the two "Four mysteries" works):
http://www.librarything.com/work/2885650
http://www.librarything.com/work/2373918

This is a combining issue rather than a relationship issue. There were a couple of copies of Albom's Els dimarts amb Morrie combined into Collin's The Woman in White. I separated them out, and combined them properly with the other copies of Tuesdays with Morrie.