Names of People in Quizbowl

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etotheipi
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Names of People in Quizbowl

Post by etotheipi »

I'd like to present two answerlines, both from recent sets (note: I'm not singling out these sets in any way! Pretty much every set I can see on quizdb does this):
ANSWER: Robert Schumann [or Jean-Baptiste Nicolas Robert Schumann]
ANSWER: Clara (Josephine) Schumann [or Clara (Josephine) Wieck; prompt on Schumann]
One question immediately pops up: why the difference in the answerlines? Here, R. Schumann's last name is all that's required, yet one is required to give C. Schumann's first initial. Why is this, especially when C. Schumann had such an impact on the musical world herself?

Some might posit that this is because R. Schumann is more "famous" or "canonical," and the data seem to bear this out, at least within quiz bowl. I mean, in my (brief) search on quizdb, there were two tossups with the answerline of "C. Schumann" and many more asking about "R. Schumann." But there's a counterexample to this: Bach. Many (not all, but at least a decent proportion) questions on Johann Sebastian Bach required an answer of "J. S. Bach," not just "Bach." There was a total of one tossup on a Bach who was not Johann Sebastian. Yet, not one answerline I found gave the same courtesy given to Carl Phillip Emmanuel (or, really, to Johann Christian, since "J. Bach" is not acceptable) to Clara Wieck!

I recently read this Slate article, and it got me thinking about how we write people's names (and how we say people's names) in quiz bowl. From the bit of research I've done, it seems like this trend of assigning last names to (white) males and full-names to "others," especially non-males, is rather pervasive in literature and auditory fine arts. See, for example, how it is always a "Kate Chopin work" but a "Chopin nocturne," "Amy Beach's Gaelic Symphony" but a "Goethe poem." There's only one (canonical) author with last name Chopin, one (canonical) composer with last name Beach, but they're always given their full names.

I think this is because not much of the community is thinking about this while they're writing sets (or answering tossups). So I'd like to propose a couple of things.

1. If you are writing an answerline on a person who shares their last name with another person who is reasonably "canonical" (i.e. Alma Mahler and Gustav Mahler), require their first name or initial consistently, or only require last name consistently (the latter would probably be preferable in most cases; I don't think people who have enough knowledge to pull a bonus part on Alma Mahler [that doesn't explicitly mention her husband] would confuse her with Gustav Mahler). In my opinion, G. Mahler answerlines should look like:
ANSWER: Gustav Mahler [prompt on Mahler]
or A. Mahler answerlines should look like
ANSWER: Alma Mahler
2. If you are writing a question, make the effort to double-name white males. Call them "Ludwig Beethoven symphonies" or "Frederic Chopin nocturnes" or "Johann Goethe poems" or "William Shakespeare plays."

3. If you are answering a question, be conscious of whether you double-name people. This seems to be a much smaller problem than the previous two, since quizbowlers are used to single-naming things they don't have to double-name to avoid errors in first name or whatnot, but being conscious of whether you're trivializing the contributions of Clara Schumann to classical music is, I think, important.

Being a male, I'm obviously not the best person to talk about things like this, but I hope that this post will be useful.

I'm kind of embarrassed that I had to look up Gustav Mahler and Johann Goethe's first names for this post.
Arya Karthik (they)

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Re: Names of People in Quizbowl

Post by Stinkweed Imp »

etotheipi wrote: Mon Oct 26, 2020 4:06 pm 1. If you are writing an answerline on a person who shares their last name with another person who is reasonably "canonical" (i.e. Alma Mahler and Gustav Mahler), require their first name or initial consistently, or only require last name consistently (the latter would probably be preferable in most cases; I don't think people who have enough knowledge to pull a bonus part on Alma Mahler [that doesn't explicitly mention her husband] would confuse her with Gustav Mahler). In my opinion, G. Mahler answerlines should look like:
ANSWER: Gustav Mahler [prompt on Mahler]
or A. Mahler answerlines should look like
ANSWER: Alma Mahler
I agree with this point. Though I'm not sure if it's a gendered issue as much as it is quizbowl being inconsistent about answerlines, it can be solved either way by having answerlines prompt on any given answer that could reasonably apply to another person. What exactly is reasonable depends on the difficulty and the content of the question. It's unlikely that someone would confuse Zadie Smith and Tony Smith, and its not necessary for a high school tournament to prompt on "Bach", but a harder college set should probably prompt on "Freud" and composers named "Adams". (Mahler and Schumann are also good examples of why questions should try to be gender neutral to avoid narrowing the answer space too much, like what happens with every question on a female anthropologist)

I don't know if I agree with point 2, and I certainly don't agree with point 3. Double-naming everyone is certainly stylistically preferable but quizbowl questions should try to be as efficient as possible, and there are many non-white men who could be unambiguously referred to by only their last name. Players should avoid any chance of a mistake by giving the minimum amount of information required to answer a question, and it's up to the editors to prompt when appropriate.
Vivian Malouf
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