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Toward Taxonomy v2
The Office of the Historian Subject Taxonomy of U.S. Foreign Relations was initially conceived in 2012 by Aaron Marrs and created by Eric Cozens in consultation with Aaron Marrs and Joe Wicentowski. It was intended to be used to be applied to Office of the Historian internal studies and collected resources, as well as online publications such the volumes of the Foreign Relations series electronic edition and the Milestones in U.S. Foreign Relations web-based articles. With 500+ terms (over half of which were names of U.S. Presidents and Secretaries of State or names of countries), it was a lean, selective listing of subjects intended to group disparate resources together for discovery, not an attempt to recreate the AFR keyword compendium or the Library of Congress Subject Headings. Once the taxonomy was created, the Office began applying the taxonomy to a number of resources, including every volume in the FRUS series, with the help of VSFS interns. In 2015, the Department of State's Bunche Library submitted the taxonomy to the Library of Congress, and it was registered as "sthus" in https://www.loc.gov/standards/sourcelist/subject.html.
The current taxonomy (v1) has served us well but 1) needs to be expanded to include additional entries and 2) reorganized—indeed, re-conceptualized—to accommodate additional categories and facilitate an expanded set of uses, including site-wide search and discovery and enrichment of document-level metadata.
For lack of a better term, we'll call the new effort Taxonomy v2.
Listed below are planned categories of information for the new, enlarged taxonomy. Entries include preliminary definitions, tentative examples, current status notes that point to existing HistoryAtState repositories containing relevant data, and related sources and vocabularies.
Definition: Significant happening(s) that may span a defined period of time (e.g. Cuban Missile Crisis or Dumbarton Oaks Conference, 1944) or broader, open-ended period (e.g. Arab-Israeli Dispute) and may be geographically concentrated (e.g. Suez Crisis) or disperse (e.g. World War II). Events may have individual, organizational, or governmental participation. Events need not be conflict-related.
Examples:
- Hungarian Revolution, 1956
- Indian Ocean Tsunami, 2004
- Korean War, 1950-1953
- Operation Babylift, 1975
Current Status: Besides a small number of events listed in the current taxonomy, we have no master list of events. The (retired) Milestones essays could be useful for reference. This is an area ripe for expansion, perhaps by consulting existing FRUS back-of-book indexes.
Related Sources and Vocabularies:
- Library of Congress Subject Headings
Definition: Domestic, international, or multinational laws, legislation, treaties, and agreements that establish, govern, and/or fund organizations, activities, and/or relations.
Example(s):
- Geneva Convention
Current Status: We have no consolidated list of mandates (legislation, treaties, agreements), but some exist in the current taxonomy. Certainly this category runs through many datasets and publications.
Related Sources and Vocabularies:
- Code of Federal Regulations: https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/cfr
- Department of State Treaties in Force: https://www.state.gov/s/l/treaty/tif/index.htm
- Library of Congress Subject Headings: http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects.html
- U.S. Code: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text
Definition: Domestic, international, and multinational groups and organizations that authored, received, participated, and/or were mentioned in the text.
Current Status: We have no consolidated list of organizations, though POCOM and the offshoot "principal-officers" dataset (an attempt to create a historical DOS organization database) could be useful for DOS organization.
Example(s):
- National Security Council
- Southeast Asia Treaty Organization
- United Nations
Related Sources and Vocabularies:
- Library of Congress Name Authority File
Definition: Individuals who authored, received, participated, and/or were mentioned in texts related to U.S. foreign policy.
Example(s):
- Kissinger, Henry A.
- Nixon, Richard
- Ridgway, Rozanne L. ("Roz")
Current Status: The original taxonomy's "people" categories of "presidents" and "secretaries" were actually misnomers; they will be renamed as "presidential administrations" and "secretarial tenures" in the new version, to reflect our actual usage of these categories. This will allow "people" to truly be a database of individual people.
People are core to HSG datasets, and some work has been done to create a unified "people" database. It was assembled from FRUS lists of persons, POCOM, Travels of the Secretary and President, and Visits of Foreign Leaders and Heads of State. Each person has a unique ID and fields for preferred and alternate names, dates of birth/death, descriptions, and links to the source of each spelling and description.
Related Sources and Vocabularies:
- Library of Congress Name Authority File: http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names.html
Definition: Geographic places, such as countries, territories, cities, posts, and other locales.
Example(s):
- Afghanistan
- Bangladesh
- United Kingdom
Current Status: The existing taxonomy has a list of places, drawn from INR's lists of independent states, dependencies, and areas of special sovereignty. This taxonomy has been applied to FRUS volumes and Milestones essays (retired) as well as HSA. Many sections/publications on hsg are also organized by their own publication-specific or not-yet-entirely-unified lists of countries: Countries (Recognitions and Relations AKA "rdcr"), Travels, Visits, and POCOM. The greatest effort thus far toward creating a unified "places" database is the "gsh" repository (historical place name database), which, with help from VSFS students, extended INR's lists to include the predecessors of entries on today's map back to ~1776. POCOM is already pulling from "gsh" for some historical country names, but much work remains to apply the country names database to existing publications and datasets. The "gsh" repository also contains a preliminary list of locales (cities) and posts, built from the Consular Cards index and current posts.
Related Sources and Vocabularies:
- Department of State Independent States in the World: https://www.state.gov/s/inr/rls/4250.htm
- Department of State Dependencies and Areas of Special Sovereignty: https://www.state.gov/s/inr/rls/10543.htm
- Library of Congress Subject Headings: http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects.html
- MARC Countries: http://www.loc.gov/marc/countries/
- Master Reference Database (MRD)
Definition: Administrative tenure of particular U.S. Presidents. Presidential administration refers to the official, executive period rather than the individual personage occupying the office of President.
Note: In cases where the individual President is present in the text, it is appropriate to declare both the individual via the People taxonomy and the administration via the Presidential Administrations taxonomy.
Example(s):
- United States. President (1933-1945 : Roosevelt, Franklin Delano)
- United States. President (1945-1953 : Truman, Harry S.)
Current Status: See People.
Related Sources and Vocabularies:
- Library of Congress Name Authority File: http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names.html
Definition: Administrative tenure of particular U.S. Secretaries of State. Secretarial administration refers to the official, executive period rather than the individual personage occupying the office of Secretary of State.
Note: In cases where the individual Secretary of State is present in the text, it is appropriate to declare both the individual via the People taxonomy and the office via the Secretarial Tenures taxonomy.
Example(s):
- United States. Department of State. Secretary (1969-1973 : Rogers, William Pierce)
- United States. Department of State. Secretary (1973-1977 : Kissinger, Henry A.)
Current Status: See People.
Related Sources and Vocabularies: *
Definition: Conceptual categories that are the subject of texts related to U.S. foreign policy.
Current Status: Many of the existing entries in the "subjects" section of the taxonomy that are not pulled into events, mandates, organizations, etc. can stay and form the basis of a greatly expanded set of topics.
Example(s):
- Foreign aid
- Political prisoners
- Nuclear weapons
Related Sources and Vocabularies:
- Department of State Subject Tags Categories: https://fam.state.gov/FAM/05FAH03/05FAH030110.html
- Library of Congress Subject Headings: http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects.html
The following table lists all public HistoryAtState repositories and, for each, notes which categories of metadata the repository could contribute to building. A check mark (✓) indicates a significant source of information for a category, whereas a dash (-) indicates little or no directly significant information.
| Resource | People | Places | Events | Orgs | Mandates | Pres. Admins | Sec. Tenures | Topics | Other |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| administrative-timeline | - | - | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | - | - | - | - |
| carousel | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | ✓ |
| conferences | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | ✓ |
| frus | ✓ | - | ✓ | ✓ | - | - | - | - | - |
| frus-history | ✓ | - | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | - | - | - | - |
| gsh | - | ✓ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| hac | ✓ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | ✓ |
| milestones | - | - | ✓ | - | ✓ | - | - | - | - |
| op/buildings | - | ✓ | - | ✓ | - | - | - | - | - |
| op/faq | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | ✓ |
| op/secretary-bios | ✓ | - | - | - | - | - | ✓ | - | - |
| op/serial-set | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | ✓ |
| op/vietnam-guide | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | ✓ |
| op/views-from-the-embassy | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | ✓ |
| people | ✓ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| pocom | ✓ | - | - | ✓ | - | - | - | - | - |
| rdcr | - | ✓ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| tags | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | - |
| terms | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| travels | ✓ | ✓ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| tumblr | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | ✓ |
| - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | ✓ | |
| visits | ✓ | ✓ | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
| wwdai | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | ✓ |
| - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |