Patricia S. Bowne

I was surfing around Scientopia and found a discussion of metadata schemas on The Book of Trogool.  I guess if I thought about it, I would have realized that different disciplines use different organizational structures for their data, and this puts up language barriers between them.  But I had never realized just how much power such a situation gives the librarians.  Especially in a university of magic!

Fortunately, Bill Hooker and Dorothea Brown over at Book of Trogool are right on top of this, even to expressing it in verse:

“Three schemas for the astronomers under the sky;
Seven for the urban planners in their halls of stone;
Nine with which biologists comply;
and ONE for the Librarian on hir Dark Throne:
In the Land of Library, where the metadata lies.
One schema to rule them all,
One schema to find them;
One schema to bring them all;
And in the repository bind them.
In the Land of Library, where the metadata lies.”

Plenty of arcane libraries exist in fiction, but most of them rely on books for their effects — biting books, evil books, flying books, books that never existed.  How much more exciting and dangerous will the virtual world of the magic library become, in modern universities of magic?

Caveat scriptor – as in all plot noodling posts, your great ideas may be stolen and used in future novels without attribution.

I finished the page proofs for “Advice from Pigeons” yesterday and have uploaded the first chapter onto my website.  You can read it here.

Mimi and David suggested that English profs at a magic university would be uniquely powerful because of their control over words, and which words others would be able to use.

Well, all this sinister plotting about controlling reality by limiting syntax sounds good at first hearing, but I think any actual attempt would end up like the discussion of Carl Zimmer’s list of banned words. Admittedly, the discussants are scientists rather than English professors, but there is not a lot of consensus on display — certainly not the amount that would be needed to redefine a whole world’s perception of reality.

So Mimi and David (and whoever else wants to chime in), how is the necessary consensus about words, and what you want to accomplish with them, going to be established? I suppose it happens in real life, with the new edition of Huckleberry Finn as an example, but I’m presuming you don’t want your coup to take that long.

Plot Noodling Post — Be warned!  Any cool ideas you post in these comments may be used in a future novel or story, and I will not even try to keep track of who deserves credit.  Don’t post any ideas you aren’t willing to give away.

Caveat over, I was wondering about the humanities at a university of magic.  My own background being in science, I’ve patterned much of the Royal Academy after that. It’s easy for me to see how engineering + magic =wizardry, or medicine + magic = sorcery.  I wouldn’t have any trouble writing about what wizards or sorcerers did.

But history+magic?  English+magic?  Arts+magic?  These don’t come so easily.

So far, the series contains two faculty in Arcane Arts.  One is a painter, and has created stained glass windows with protective wards in them.  The other is an iconomancer, or diviner, and identifies which of the divine powers resides in a particular artifact.  But two arts faculty do not a University make! 

Help me shore up my weak spot.  What should humanities scholars in a University of Magic be working on?