Official Project Update #7

[doranwen]

This update has been a bit slow in coming, mainly due to life busyness. However, I at least finally finished sorting through Schools & Education groups, have sorted through Science groups, and then waded through Romance & Relationships (which had an inordinate amount of porn, naturally). The Romance & Relationships/Adult category, in particular, had approximately a 2:1 ratio of porn to non-porn, the latter being a mix of alternative lifestyle groups, fandom groups (which might have explicit fanfic or fanart), and random other groups that somehow ended up in there (such as a Nigerian ladies' golf association group!). Unfortunately, not all of the non-porn groups were saved, but at least a decent number were, mainly the fandom ones.

The Romance & Relationships/Romance category was possibly the most tedious so far of all categories, because not only did I have to pull off at least two to three times the number of groups that got to stay on the sheet I worked off (so much Unknown, porny Unknown, and Arabic, plus a good number with encoding issues), I couldn't tell apart many of those types from a quick scan due to the sheer quantity of HTML tags present. I frequently had to double-click to expand the description in order to tell if it was purely Unknown, if there was Arabic script or encoding symbols, etc.

Given that, I was relieved to finally finish the Romance & Relationships categories and move on to all the categories that Yahoo created after the fact. When put in sequential order, the earlier categoryid numbers belonged to categories who, next to each other, were all related under the same main category. However, Yahoo's people in charge of Groups clearly realized after creating them that more categories were needed. Suddenly the categories are in smaller blocks - occasionally a stretch of 10 or 20 related categories, but often just one or two categories, completely isolated from anything else related. It's meant a lot more variety in sorting, which is delightful after the tedium of Schools & Education and Romance & Relationships. I even found a group in a new language—Tongan.

I also discovered a new type of spam group - found only in the Schools & Education/Other category so far. The groups have a 5-14 character keysmash (including digits) type name and summary, and a description that reads "Dont know anything". I find it somewhat ironic that such a description is found in a spam group type that's only in a Schools & Education category…


Actual stats:

Now up to 45.06% sorted and 1.75% tagged.

Available tabs:

English: 1803
Spanish: 26
Portuguese: 15
Italian: 86
German: 3
French: 4
Chinese: 8
Indonesian/Malay: 75
Arabic: 37
Persian: 11
Turkish: 38
Romanian: 27
Unknown: 144
Spam: 22


Something fun:

The group "MEDTC-DISCUSS" looked a bit out of place in the Teaching and Methods category, but would almost certainly be of interest to someone…

This is a moderated discussion group about publications and other resources on medieval and early modern clothing, dress accessories, and textiles (including tools and processes).

Selections specifically concern clothing and textiles as a subset of material culture (not furniture or pottery, for example). Time and place focus is Europe and the Mediterranean, approximately 500 to 1600 CE. Emphasis is on scholarly and academic work, as opposed to "craft" or theatrical resources. Works under discussion include monographs, journal articles, theses, archaeology reports, and other published (and unpublished) resources, in any language, as well as events such as symposia, conferences, and museum exhibits substantially devoted to clothing and textiles of this period. Posts may be in any language, though English is preferred.

Membership requires moderator permission. Spam will not be tolerated. List members are invited to send notifications of any sources that they have encountered. Active scholars are encouraged to send announcements of their own publications and presentations. Please keep posts on-topic; discussion of personal projects (other than publications), reproduction techniques, supplies, social or re-enactment events, etc. should be taken to more appropriate fora.

This is NOT a SCA or reenactment list but that of academia. References to reenactment organizations... and one's membership in them... are strongly discouraged.

Comments

[arcanetrivia]

That's a pretty snobby attitude about the SCA. Sure, nobody on this list is going to want to hear about last weekend's crown tourney, but people often get dug into real academic stuff there in the pursuit of whatever period art or science they may be interested in. My mother is a Laurel (peerage award for contribution to art/science) for costuming and embroidery, and you oughtta see her reference library relating to medieval textile arts.

[doranwen]

Haha, I know! I was thinking that myself: "Well, that's certainly An Attitude to have." I'm sure there's still some interesting stuff in the group, though, even if the mods were a bit opinionated about the SCA.