Decisions, decisions...

[davewitley]

OK, promised 'case studies', if that's not too grand.

7503 - accept.  Issue - I coded to Voldemort and Blood Protection 
(2.7.1, 3.5.4) but not Harry.  Should I have checked Harry, too?  
See below for more on this.

7506 - accept, just, 2.14.7, HRH relationships.  Issue - without 
going 'up thread' on the list itself it was virtually impossible to 
distinguish Yael's (the poster) from Jim's contributions.  Should it 
be reject, too badly written (though it may have been an e-mail 
client formatting problem)?  It also discussed Harry's (potential) 
propensity to withdraw from close relationships - do we have a 
category for that, other than 'Harry'?  Perhaps 1.1.3.1 
Trust/Mistrust?

7507 - accept, 1.3.1.2 Reader response & subversive readings.  
Issue - when do threads go OT?  This one is about theories of 
interpretation and the category was not ideal.  Not too much of a 
problem in itself but:

7508 - reject as OT, despite being interesting and still relevant to 
the thread.  The reason being that 7507 was IMO still discussing 
ways to approach JKR's work, while 7508 was more generally about 
approaching literature.

7511 - a classic 'is this person saying something?' post.  Accept, 
1.3.1.2, Reader response.  Issue - is this a 0.8 or 0.8.1?

7543 - rejected (OT, good job I checked this one as I'd 
inadvertently coded to 0 instead of 'reject').  Issue - this is a 
question about literary interpretation.

Something I feel will be an ongoing issue is the categorisation of 
topics within the major characters (HRH, Neville, Draco, MWPP, 
Snape, Dumbledore, Hagrid).  ATM we mainly have acronyms or the 
names of theories (e.g. Stoned!Harry).  I understand there is a 
process for demoting these, but what should go in their place?

For example, there was at one time a great deal of discussion of 
Neville and memory charms, which spawned a number of theories and, 
no doubt, acronyms.  I feel the topic is 'memory charms', which 
might pull together a number of acronyms for theories involving the 
MOM, Neville's grandmother, DEs as perpetrators as well as Cindy's 
wilder Jobberknoll theories yet is, say, distinct from discussion of 
Neville as mirror to Harry, and distinct from discussion of memory 
charms in general.

The trouble is, the acronyms might be OK if we knew from memory what 
they all stand for, but it's quite laborious to look them up (I have 
dumped the database, to coin a phrase, into an Excel spreadsheet and 
sorted alphabetically but, for example, suppose I wanted to put 7506 
in a 'Harry's unresponsiveness' category or something similar, it 
means finding all Harry-related acronyms and seeing if one fits.

This is only one example - we may need to brainstorm topics for each 
of the above characters.

Finally, in my post earlier today (well, yesterday) I wasn't 
proposing changing the criteria for rejection, just trying to 
clarify in my own mind and verify the correctness of what I was 
doing.

David