If I my question is about a certain book by an author, should I use the tag for both the book and the author? Or just the book? What's the purpose of these author tags in the first place and when can I use them?
@Riker mostly i just don't see tagging as a thing that needs to be cleared with meta before it's used; on rpg.se we treat it as an emergent folksonomy: if you think a tag is necessary, add it and use it; if you don't, don't add it or use it; the shape of tagging evolves from how people are using it, and issues are discussed when they are worth discussing.
@Riker see I don't agree with that because you can ask a question about an author independent of the works they have produced, whereas a character is already contained in a work
@Mithrandir hopefully we'll do things that way; tags are after all for what a question is fundamentally about rather than what it might be loosely connnected to. though if i remember correctly (new?) users might sometimes see a tag suggestion mechanism which would encourage them to pick tags they might not otherwise.
@Gallifreyan quite possibly. it's how rpg.se wound up with a lot of pretty decent tags and a lot of weird tags we revisited and removed/renamed/synonymised.
@NapoleonWilson well, the meta discussion afterwards is important.
i'll point out that on RPG.SE we use emergent folksonomy and meta disscussion. we do meta discussion when it's worth talking about curating our tags. we have agreed-upon tag practices which emerged as we created and discussed things.
we have a pretty good tagging system too i think.
there are definitely times discussion in advance is appropriate. there are also times we've done tagging system overhauls: a particular very large system of games (World of Darkness) got a big tagging overhaul when a particular edition was announced, because our old tagging system for it was evidently facing a bit of a breaking point. we worked it out together and the community went retagging questions dilligently.
other things we standardised effectively along the way, like our tagging scheme for D&D questions, which is healthy and what we're doing here.
just, what i mean is, it isn't always necessary to clear a particular kind of tag usage on meta first. judgement calls can be made there.
I'm writing this in an FAQ-style answer, addressed to everybody, not just you.
There are lots of ways to help!
You can help in lots of different ways!
Ask questions.
We always need more questions - it's very hard to answer questions if there aren't any! We'd like good, interesting, on-topi...
@kristan You always get that. Considering that you'd only ever accepted one answer before the two you accepted on Lit, I can understand how you'd forget, though. See your activity from September 19th here: esperanto.stackexchange.com/users/60/…
@Catija Ah, I guess I didn't notice the rep change at that time. And yeah, I didn't ask very many questions, and wasn't all that impressed with the answers I got for most of them, so... :-P
@kristan Most of the questions I ask are on Metas, so I'm in the same boat... you don't get rep changes when you accept answers on Meta sites unless it's MSE. :)
Say you read a book when you were ten and really loved it. Now you're thirty and want to read the book again, but you can't remember what it was called.
Could someone in this situation give details about the book (plot, characters, etc.) and ask if others know the book they are speaking of? Thi...
@Riker Just in general, I think the distinction between the speaker and the author is important and I was wondering whether that would be classified as a minor edit.
@Hamlet I have never really liked video games and movies, but those videos made it more interesting. Thanks for sharing them!
user61230
8:37 PM
@Benjamin Changing from speaker to author is a pretty significant change to meaning
Here's a good link about symbolists, imagists, and modernists in Western & European poetry.
user61230
9:18 PM
I'd suggest it with the caveat that the entire way of thinking about the three categories is... very limiting in its generalization.
user61230
@BESW If you ever choose to come back to the book, I found out an interesting tidbit that gives House of Leaves a lot more clarity. It was originally published online (even the first print edition is the "second edition") over time as a collection of files, rather than as a completed narrative. This helps explain a lot of questions, not just the appendices, but the exhibits, the Whalestoe letters, and some of the later chapters in the book.
It might be improved by talking about the flaws of the monomyth itself--that is, how it's presented as a stretchy, pliable thing so vague and broad that it will claim to describe anything which even sorta implies the movements Campbell describes.
It's sort of like saying "Look, water is shaped like everything we put it in, except the things with holes."
@Hamlet For a wider critique of the concept of monomyth, rather than Campbell's particular iteration of it, you might find works like Houston Wood's "Preparing to Retheorize the Texts of Oceania" useful.
He talks about how forms and concepts of literature and story which Euro-American critics consider universal are, in fact, artificial products of analyzing a limited cultural sample and prioritizing some kinds of writing as more valuable than others.
This is a problem I've encountered from day one on our site: when I'm answering a question that's asking about what certain portions of a work of literature mean, do I need to include quotes from outside sources to support my answer? Is this always the case? Is there a time when my personal exper...