Julian Humphries wrote:
"You don't build the microscopes you use to examine artifacts nor do
you tell your doctor how to remove your gall bladder."

It seems to me that there has been a lot of awareness recently, what
with lots of the wrong gall bladders being removed, that maybe
division of labor has gone a little too far. Division of labor in
our society has led to the erection of barriers between people in
the form of professional jargons etc., which are designed to protect
jobs and privileges but which actually do us who can't always afford
hordes of professionals not a lot of good. I argue what I argue
about symbol processing because I am a humanities specialist who
found it very easy to cross the line once I learned the language--as
did Robert Baron and several others on this list, as did those who
have written most of the specific commercial museum applications now
available. I think it is important for people to understand how
their tools work, whether they want to make them or directly use
them or not, so that they can decide whether they want to buy into
the assumptions that their tools inevitably embody, that's all. If
people want to ignore that and trust their data to someone else's
vision and business acumen that's fine: we all must trust to a huge
degree in the society we live in, and tend to do so without thinking
about it where the trust doesn't hit too close to home. But
sometimes when we trust in that way, we end up with unusable
data--or minus a perfectly healthy gall bladder.

Pat Galloway
MS Dept. of Archives and History