ANST - Documentation -Reply

[Norman White]

Greetings from Jin Liu Ch'ang following Petrucio's lead and putting on my Laurel's hat too:

Lady Simone wrote (with some snippage): 
>I understand the reasoning for documentation. >Documentation though dose not reflect on the Quality >of an artesian  Some artisans spend so much time
>working on and perfecting their art, that they may not >have the time, wish or research skills to do >Documentation.  
Documentation DOES reflect highly on the quality of an artisan.  No artisan can claim to be perfecting their art in the SCA context without doing research on their art.  You may make something very beautiful and skillfully  and it may win many populous votes in A&S contests but unless it was accompanied with research then it may have aspects to its construction or look that would make it stand out like a sore thumb if placed in the real middle ages.  For instance (and this is not my area of expertise), someone may make a piece of garb that is absolutely stunning and you may have people running up to you and absolutely gushing over its beauty.  But when it is examined critically it may be observed that it has aspects from several places and times which are widely separated and therefore not very medieval.  Another example, which I have seen in contests I have judged (also not in my specialty), involves drawings.  Several times I have been asked to judge drawings in contests which were very beautiful but were not done in a style or with techniques known in the Middle Ages.  Using medieval techniques would have resulted in an equally beautiful piece of work but would have required much less time, therefore the lack of study cost the worker not only recognition in the contest but their own time and trouble as the method they chose took much more of both.

She also said:
>and when a full 1/5 of an artisans scores based on >documentation you set the potential for Those with  >inferior work to elevated over those with Quality work.
If you truly know the art then the only thing stopping you from scoring well in a contest is the writing block preventing you from showing you know it with documentation.  You are fooling yourself if you think that you can do truly Quality work without studying what was really done.  If you read the last set of comments I wrote above, you will notice that commonly the judges are judging something in an area in which they have no expertise.  That is another good reason for documentation.  In your documentation, it is your job as the artist to tell us how great the product is, how hard it was to make, how it directly copies something you saw in a book and why you did not do something that may would have been done.  Without that help the judge may not recognize your product for the amount of time and trouble you had in making it.

She continued with an example of an Elizabethan gown and how what she felt was an excellent gown lost to what she felt was an inferior gown because the excellent gown had no documentation but the inferior gown had documentation.  She stated that the maker of the excellent gown "spent the time to makes sure it fit well and was done as true as possible to replicate the gown."
If she took the time to be sure that the gown truly replicated an existing gown then she had done the hard part of the documentation - the background research.  She then says that a "gown defiantly inferior to the first",  received "a score of 29 out of 40 but then receives 8 points for her documentation is added in she scores a 37. This woman wins."  
As a laurel who judges commonly and was judging before I got the laurel, I doubt that the second gown would have received that good a score if it was that bad.  I can not speak to the construction details but the other gown probably had a much better design with all the details consistent  where some may not have been consistent on the other gown.

She then stated:
>now the inferior art is what represents the best our >kingdom has to offer in costuming. This same scenario >can be used for almost every art. 
I am of the school that it is easier to do the research first and produce a truly medieval product than to produce a medieval looking product and then try to document it.  Commonly when you do it the second way you find that there were easier and better looking ways to do the project.  I would consider any garb produced without any research to be the inferior product.  It may be prettier to those who know no better but the glaring errors in detail will ruin it for the knowledgeable.

>For Art forms that the judging is Subjective such as >performing, brewing and cooking. I become worried >when so much attention is given to the >documentation, because in lowering the needed skill >in these areas because of their importance of >documentation, we may see overtime a lower >standard of Quality in their arts, because those with >less skill can be determined better, because they can >write and research better.
I'll put up my meads, or Meadbh's's or Rosario's foods which are documentable against anyone's non-documentable products anytime.  Being documentable does not mean inferior.  I would never had come up with so many good recipes without the help of those who were there in the Middle Ages.

I do like the new forms in some ways although I have some trouble figuring out what goes into which category.

Jin Liu Ch'ang
m.k.a. Norman White


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