Dear Jessica,

Just to clarify, because I don’t want the nuance to be lost at all — I actually *don’t* think this would be a merely performative change in this case, and I didn’t mean to be read that way.  Computer UI design is all about metaphor, and the metaphor of the branch names is currently not helpful.  This is an excellent opportunity to rename the ‘release’ branch as something more meaningful (for this reason, I’d rather have something other than ‘main’, in fact), *and* get rid of potentially and needlessly offensive language at the same time. It is an important signal to send and would bring clarity to the project. If you read what I wrote in any other way, I apologize for clumsy wording.

Best wishes,

Nicholas




On 2 Jul 2020, at 16:46, Jessica Lu <jhl.jessica@gmail.com> wrote:

Thank you, Hugh, for opening this conversation up among Council. Should be no surprise that I'm fully in favor of getting rid of 'master' and 'slave' language whenever possible.

I appreciate the points everyone else has raised upthread, and am heartened by Elisa's observation that this may be an opportune time to experiment with how such a change will impact the build process. Hugh and Nicholas are certainly right in pointing out that performative actions often hinder or distract from more substantive changes in practice and process; but (1) this is the sort of change that can have a big impact in Black and brown folks' encounters with TEI, insofar as it would dissolve an unnecessary barrier and guttural negative response to the grammar of encoding work; and (2) I think the spirit and intention behind this change does and can continue to carry forward into Council's everyday work. 

In general, my approach with these things is: if it's a small thing, why not change it (in addition to tackling bigger things), and if it's a big thing, better to start now than later. 

-j.

On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 11:27 AM Martin Holmes <mholmes@uvic.ca> wrote:
Hi Hugh,

I take your point, but I was thinking really that rather than doing the
archetypal "here let me fix that for you" thing that we tend to default
into, we should do more of the "shut up, step back and get out of the
way" approach proposed by Deb Verhoeven at DH2015.

Cheers,
Martin

On 2020-07-02 8:00 a.m., Hugh Cayless wrote:
> I'm going to gently disagree with you, Martin. I think it's precisely us
> old white people who need to work on picking apart the threads of
> structural racism and not put that work off on others. But I understand
> and sympathize with your reluctance to pronounce on this issue!
>
> All the best,
> Hugh
>
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 2, 2020 at 10:31 AM Martin Holmes <mholmes@uvic.ca
> <mailto:mholmes@uvic.ca>> wrote:
>
>     Hi all,
>
>     My gut feeling is that old white males like me should have no part in a
>     decision like this. We have (I hope) a large enough community of TEI
>     users who don't fall into my category, and they should tell us what's
>     appropriate.
>
>     Cheers,
>     Martin
>
>     On 2020-07-02 7:01 a.m., Hugh Cayless wrote:
>      > Hi All,
>      >
>      > Some of you may have come across the recent move toward changing the
>      > default branch name in Git away from "master" to (probably)
>     "main". My
>      > understanding is that GitHub is working on this, and that it will
>      > probably happen in Git as well. I'm aware of a number of projects
>     that
>      > are moving ahead immediately on renaming their master branches.
>      >
>      > On the one hand, I'm generally in favor of this. The "master"
>      > terminology probably came from BitKeeper, which had "master" and
>     "slave"
>      > repositories (rather than branches). I had always assumed it was
>     meant
>      > in the sense of "master copy", like in sound recordings. But see
>     also
>      > https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1271477451756056577 from the
>     person
>      > responsible for the name (not a native English speaker).
>      >
>      > On the other hand, I'm slightly cynical about this sort of thing, as
>      > it's the kind of change one can make and feel righteous about
>     without
>      > being *actually* significantly anti-racist. It's a bit
>     performative, but
>      > sometimes it's important to set an example.
>      >
>      > So I think we should consider going through the renaming process
>     for TEI
>      > repos. There are probably some implications to doing that, broken
>     links
>      > being the first one that comes to mind. What do you all think?
>      >
>      > Hugh
>      >
>      > _______________________________________________
>      > Tei-council mailing list
>      > Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org <mailto:Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org>
>      > http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council
>      >
>
>     --
>     -------------------------------------
>     Humanities Computing and Media Centre
>     University of Victoria
>     mholmes@uvic.ca <mailto:mholmes@uvic.ca>
>     _______________________________________________
>     Tei-council mailing list
>     Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org <mailto:Tei-council@lists.tei-c.org>
>     http://lists.lists.tei-c.org/mailman/listinfo/tei-council
>

--
-------------------------------------
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University of Victoria
mholmes@uvic.ca
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--
Dr. Jessica H. Lu
Associate Director, Design Cultures & Creativity (DCC)
University of Maryland Honors College
pronouns: she/her/hers
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