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dracor-org / dracor-schema

ODD and schemas for dracor.org files
https://dracor.org/doc/odd
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Gender values #46

Open ingoboerner opened 1 year ago

ingoboerner commented 1 year ago

Currently, schema allows: MALE, FEMALE, UNKNOWN (we have some spelling variations here: *UNKOWN, *UNKWON); for MALE *MAE In some corpora (Cal but also Swe) there are other values, e.g. DIVERSE and MIXED... which, unlike the spelling errors, might be actually useful. Shall we extend the allowed values?

ingoboerner commented 1 year ago

here is an example of MIXED: https://dracor.org/api/corpora/swe/play/strindberg-till-damaskus DIVERSE see CalDraCor, e.g. { "id": "musicos", "name": "MÚSICOS", "isGroup": true, "sex": "DIVERSE" },

ingoboerner commented 1 year ago

see also NONBINARY here: https://github.com/GOLEM-lab/golem-frontend-api/blob/57c55c6984e681ea2162b6099b02a207c78dda02/schemas.py#L45

lehkost commented 1 year ago

Thanks for collecting these variants! I think the examples above are well covered by "UNKNOWN" in our current use of the term in combination with elements person and personGrp (assuming that UNKNOWN can be anything from MIXED and DIVERSE to actually UNKNOWN – this is far from perfect, but acknowledging that we cannot really annotate MIXED or DIVERSE if we don't have a clear understanding of what this would mean for all of our thousands of plays since antiquity). It is a bit similar to the imperfect annotation of character relations, where e.g. "associated_with" covers such a range of things that it is near unusable for interesting queries. But it's a start and we can always further qualify our data at a later point.

Also, TEI guidelines 4.5.0 introduce a differentiation between sex and gender attributes. In the light of this, we have to find a clear annotation strategy for this kind of data before we make any adjustments in all our corpora. Until then, I would propose to fall back to UNKNOWN in cases like the ones you described.

lb42 commented 1 month ago

Your schematron currently produces the message “Information on gender of character is missing. Consider adding attribute "sex"” -- this suggests that you don’t distinguish the terms “sex” and “gender”, a habit which will not make you any friends amongst native English speakers: see further https://www.coe.int/en/web/gender-matters/sex-and-gender.

In my opinion “gender”, being a socially-defined characteristic, is the appropriate term to apply to role names within a play, more especially because roles in a play are frequently (to use modern terminology) gender-fluid – the character Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night has three names: “Rosalind” and “Viola” both of which are “female” gender, and Curio which is “male” gender. “sex”, being a biologically-defined characteristic cannot apply to a name, since (unlike actors) names are not biological creatures , though the person to which they refer may be. I say “may be” because characters represented on the Victorian stage are sometimes personifications of non biological entities such as fairies, or allegorical figures like the British Lion; these may have gender but not, strictu sensu, sex.

Moreover, and especially in Victorian theatre, neither gender nor sex is purely binary. Actresses (that is, actors of biologically defined female sex) frequently performed roles with masculine gender (so-called “breeches parts”) ; just as male actors frequently performed roles with feminine gender (so-called “travestie parts”.)