FactGrid:Career Statements
The present mess
Our present way to deal with career statements is still messy. The reason for this is historical. We started with an input from German address books - loading here everything from "baker" to "widow of a merchant" and "Doctor of medicine and senator" on a single Property Property:P165 - a property which eventually needed that extra broad label "career statement".
The second messy step came with the quickly reduce the risk of a language fork - the solution was here the Deepl-translation of the entire set of some 3,000 statements into English and French. It worked well with simple trades like "Baker" but created a mess with all the rarer names of historical trades.
A third insecurity came into the field with the neighbouring Property:P164 for "offices held" - here we began to link to very specific offices like Pastorate Altenbergen. Some of these specific terms also received the P2-statement "career statement".
On top of that we introduced a qualifier for specific positions Property:P166 since positions such as the Pastorate Altenbergen could be held by "Parish substitutes", "Pastors" or "Parish vicars" - which had to be qualified.
The various problems we created will not be solved that easily on the present number of roughly 4,600 items. We have:
- unnecessary variations: Laquai, Lakei
- compound statements of the sort "Carpenter's widow" (to be resolved as widow, Qualifier: status of deceased husband: Carpenter)
- compound statements of the sort "Retired carpenter" (to be resolved as Pensioner, Qualifier: status of former occupation: Carpenter)
- compound statements where people had different positions and occupations
- academic titles which we could just state under their own property
- honorary titles such as "Senator", or "Privy councillor" (de: Geheimrat) which should perhaps rather be seen as awards under that property
- German labels where French and English words should appear
The problem of unnecessary? variations: Laquai, Lakai
This is an easy case where we have just spelling variants such as in Laquai and Lakei but a complex problem where we have alternatives like Laquai and Valet de Chambre or Kammer-Diener. The early modern Kammer-Diener could be a high ranking title of honour.
The problem of compound statements
We should resolve most of the compound statements.
- "Carpenter's widow" should become Property:P165 Career statement "Widow" + Qualifier Property:P614 Status of the (deceased) husband "Carpenter"
- "Retired Carpenter" should become Property:P165 Career statement Item:Q37181 "Retired" (or Item:Q37178 Pensioner) + Qualifier Property:P211 Previous Professional status "Carpenter". In addition we should set a P165 first level statement on "Carpenter" to note that former position.
- "Inn keeper and master cooper" should become two statements, with the respective dates to state the simultaneity.
The complexity is here that we might actually preserve some of the compounds in the last case as they stand for a specific design of the production, e.g. in a factory that produces these two products.
The problem of academic titles
The problem of honorary positions such as "Privy councillor"/"Geheimrat"
The problem of our first Deepl translations
The best solution is here a translation with the look into contemporary dictionaries (see our collection historical dictionaries that went online at FactGrid:Authentic translation help).
The problem is here, however, that the different languages did not show the same differentiations. There are fields that received various specific terms in some languages (reflecting here the definitions defended by the old guilds), whilst other languages have just one word for the job that needed to be done.
The problem increases with the historical developments we are trying to grasp. Here we have terms that remain stable whilst the jobs were changing - and again these changes were not always noted in the various languages simultaneously and coherently. Some changed words and some did not.