BIOGRAPHICAL DATA ELEMENTS

 

 

2.0       PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS AREA

 

DEFINITION:           

This category records significant physical aspects of an individual, and skills for which the individual may be recognized.

 

DISCUSSION:         

 

            >>Purpose:               

Recording personal characteristics helps further identify the individual, and captures information about him or her that may be significant to a full understanding of the person's biography.

 

            >>Nature:                  

Information about personal characteristics may be extremely well documented and "objective," or at the other extreme, completely speculative. Claims and statements made by individuals themselves may be dubious, and corroboration will be necessary to record this information without qualification.

 

SOURCES:              

Information about personal characteristics can be derived from records about an individual (such as a driver's license), as well as statements and records produced by the individual him- or herself. This information is often passed down by oral tradition in the case of notorious or legendary figuresu [how many of us have looked into Elizabeth Taylor's eyes?]

 

USES:                       

So-called "objective" information about personal characteristics may be used to disambiguate persons who are otherwise indistinguishable. Information about skills can be used in attribution of archival records to an individual (e.g., someone known to have no second language may thus be disproved as the source of certain materials). Information about personal characteristics is also used to establish the context for biographical events and details, when those personal characteristics form an integral and important part of the individual's life.

 

ACCESS:                 

Access to this information, while important, will not likely be a primary access point to any biographical description. Researchers may access this information in order to collocate individuals for study as a class.

 

INTERCHANGE:    

Associations between the subcategories must be maintained during information exchange or data transfer.

 

RELATIONSHIPS:  

 

 

ISSUES:       

Why aren't these considered characteristics part of "Identification"?

 

 

 

 

2.1       PHYSICAL ATTRIBUTES

 

DEFINITION:           

Characteristics that are part of a person's physical and emotional being, including physiological features, psychological traits, and behaviors.

 

DISCUSSION:         

 

            >>Purpose:               

Recording information about a person's physical attributes helps to identify the person unambiguously. It also serves to capture information about the person that may be significant to a full understanding of the person's biography, in which case the attribute should be fully described in the context of the biographic record.

 

            >>Nature:                  

This information often changes over time, both naturally as a process of aging (e.g., hair color), but also suddenly as precipated by circumstance (e.g., the amputation of a limb); thus, dates and circumstances associated with personal characteristics will be important to record. This information may be speculative, i.e., derived from secondary sources without verification, and care must be taken to identify the level of certainty with which the information is recorded.

 

SOURCES:              

When physical attributes figure prominently in the biography of an individual, those attributes are often documented in both primary and secondary sources. Information about less prominent features, or about attributes that the individual denied or suppressed, may only be available through records created in confidence about the individual. This information is often passed down by oral tradition in the case of prominent, notorious or legendary figures.

 

USES:                       

Information about a person's physical attributes may be used to distinguish between persons who are otherwise identical. This information is also used to establish the context for biographical events and details, when those personal characteristics form an integral and important part of the individual's life.

 

ACCESS:                 

Researchers may access this information in order to collocate individuals for study as a class; thus, both the type of attribute, as well as its value, will need to be retrievable. Researchers will also want to access this information by the dates in which a given attribute was present.

 

TERMINOLOGY:

Controlled terminology is necessary for recording the types of attributes, and recommended for describing the attributes themselves.

 

EXAMPLES:

<type> / <value>

gender / male (with dates); female (with dates)

Ex:      Richard Raskin, who changed his sex and became Renee Richards

 

handedness / left-handed

Ex:       Leonardo da Vinci, whose left-handedness explains why his manuscripts are all in mirror script

 

height / 28 cm.

Ex:       Tom Thumb, whose minute stature was his claim to fame

 

physical handicap / paralyzed

Ex:       Chuck Close, who, after an illness affected his spinal cord, sustained his career as a portraitist using special forklifts to maneuver his wheelchair

 

INTERCHANGE:    

Associations between the subcategories must be maintained during information exchange or data transfer.

 

RELATIONSHIPS:  

 

 

ISSUES:       

 

 

 

           

2.2       SKILLS

 

DEFINITION:           

Fluency (or lack thereof) in a set of techniques or processes used to perform an action.

 

DISCUSSION:         

 

            >>Purpose:               

It is important to document the skills that a person has acquired, or that a person may lack, in order to understand the extent of that person's intellectual scope, the range of activities in which the person can be shown to have engaged, and the character of the records that individual is likely to have produced.

 

            >>Nature:                  

This information will include description of skills that have been acquired (e.g., literacy, linguistic proficiencies [including the ability to read music], physical skills such as typing, shorthand, mastery of Morse code, etc.); it is also useful to record skills that a person lacks, when that lack adds context to a person's accomplishments (for example, that Jelly Roll Morton could not read music [is this true?]).

 

SOURCES:              

In the case of linguistic skills, this information can usually be deduced directly from the languages of the records an individual creates. Other types of skills may be described in accounts by contemporaries or documented in secondary sources.

 

USES:                       

Information about skills can be used in attribution of archival records to an individual (e.g., someone known to have no second language may thus be disproved as the source of certain materials). Information about skills is used to contextualize the achievements of an individual, such as when the lack of certain skills is overcome as an impediment.

 

ACCESS:                 

Researchers will probably want access to this information only as secondary information, accessible via controlled vocabulary but containing contextual information describing the relevance of each skill to the biography of the person.

 

TERMINOLOGY:

Controlled vocabulary recommended.

 

EXAMPLES:

Illiterate

quadrilingual (English, German, Italian, and French)

 

INTERCHANGE:    

Associations between the subcategories must be maintained during information exchange or data transfer.

 

RELATIONSHIPS:  

 

 

ISSUES: