Issue 1432: poor source

New issue submitted

Assigned changed to »anselm« (previously »None«)
Disposition changed to »Needs help« (previously »New«)

The database orders dance sources according to a numeric priority which is designed to put publications by RSCDS HQ first, then publications by RSCDS branches, then publications by non-RSCDS dance groups and individuals – based on the idea that people are, on the whole, more likely to own the former than the latter.

Within the various “priority groups” there is the possibility to prioritise further (e.g., in the “RSCDS HQ” category, numbered books come first and combined A5 editions and pocket editions come later, among a few other rules). If everyone agrees that for a dance that occurs both in John Drewry’s Welsh Set and the Greenburn Book 2, the latter is the more accessible source, there is no problem with our prioritising the latter over the former. Right now they are all at the same priority which means that the order in which they come out of the database is undefined.

Where this makes the biggest difference is in a context where only one source can be given (e.g., in dance lists or crib sheets). In this case the database picks the highest-priority source. This can lead to strange effects, e.g., even though in the RSCDS HQ canon, the combined A5 books are now considered the “best” sources, the original numbered books have higher priority simply because it would be silly to quote “Combined A5 edition of Books 1-6” as the source for “Petronella” when everyone knows that the dance is the first in Book 1.

Sorry guys, I don’t get what’s the point here. Is there anything specific to do, to change, to go through?
To be honest, as far as I am concerned, to ME (as an SCDDB user, not an editor) the order of the priority list is mostly unimportant. There are not that many dances with oodles of publication entries, and I look up and down the list whether I have one of the books or not, and then that’s it. I don’t really care which of two entries is first. As an editor, I am willing to try and stick to the proposed order of course, yet, quite often, I personally would NOT know by heart which publication might be wider spread than the other. I am merely scratching the surface in having copies of publications, yet alone knowing more about them in general.

The priorities are set per dance inside a publication entry. If one or two dances in one book are republished in another book at the same default level in the priority system (ie in two books by the deviser rather than one by RSCDS) then its really hard to track. And generally hard to know which publication has wider reach.

We could try and do this but will probably get it wrong in some cases. I would generally agree that as long as all publications containing a dance are listed that is the main thing. Ordering priorities seems like a lower priority task for a very rainy day.

I am not sure what algorithm Anselm’s software uses for ordering publications if two have the same priority. One obvious choice would be publication date taking the more recently published book first. In this case we appear not to know the publication date of the Welsh Set whereas the Greenburn Book is dated 2000.

If unknown date is considered more important than a known date that would be something to be fixed in the next software version. Another suggestion for Anselm?

The first question about publication priorities is “why does this even matter?” One answer to that is that the highest-priority publication (i.e., the one with the lowest “priority number” in the database) is the one that will be quoted as a source in a context where only one source can reasonably be given, e.g., in tabular dance lists. The general idea is to prefer RSCDS HQ publications over RSCDS branch publications over publications by random other dance groups and individuals, i.e., when listing “Pelorus Jack” we would like this to be sourced to RSCDS Book 41 rather than Barry Skelton’s Dolphin Book, on the not-entirely-unfounded grounds that we expect more people to have Book 41 to hand than the Dolphin Book. It is debatable whether RSCDS collection-type publications such as the “Guide to SCD” or “30 Popular Dances II” should count as higher priorities than the original publications for dances like J. B. Milne or Shiftin’ Bobbins, simply because these attributions look a bit weird to people who know where these dances really come from, but OTOH again it is reasonable to assume that more people have access to “30 Popular Dances II” than the “Angus Fitchet Scottish Dance Album” published by Hugh Foss in the mid-1950s (also because, unlike the latter, the former is actually in print and very easy to obtain these days). We could of course start marking “original” publications in DancesPublicationsMap table entries (regardless of priority) and allow purists to prefer these entries by way of a profile setting, but it may not be worth the hassle.

Secondly, the ordering between equal-priority publications for a dance is essentially random and subject to change between calls to the database. This is not something I have been losing sleep over, because in cases where it really seems to matter it is easy to tweak the priorities to produce any desired outcome. In the case at hand, if we decide that the Greenburn Book is the more appropriate “primary” source of the dance, we should set the priority in that DancesPublicationsMap entry to “30” and the priority in that for the Welsh Set to “31”. If people feel that the publication date should play a role in this, then that could surely be arranged, although it seems to me that in some cases, earlier should trump later and in others, the other way round – with Roy Goldring’s dances, should the earlier publication of “Lammermuir Hills” in “Wells House and other Strathspeys” win over “Auld Friends Meet” (the big posthumous omnibus edition of various Roy Goldring books by ScotScores) or the other way round? And we’d need to figure out what role a publication date of “unknown” should play here.