A personal anecdote before we get to the meat of this post – At home we’re teaching the kid about names and how you can call people different things and all of them are correct. Like I am Kendra and mommy. Or they are Eddie or Edmund (despite their fierce protests). It’s a hard concept for a toddler to grasp, which is kind of cool to see unfold and try to explain.
This week I’ve been thinking about the mess of talking about government legislation and rules because the names are either too generic to be useful, repeated and therefore confusing, or have multiple names that shift overtime. Not every piece of legislation can be ISTEA (sounds like “ice tea”). When my editor asked me to clarify what I meant when talking about SB1 in a recent thing I wrote, I realized that though I could call it the Road Repair and Accountability Act nobody really does. It’s SB1. Like there will never be another piece of legislation in California called SB1.
And you can’t confuse AB375 from 2018, the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 and SB375 from 2008, the Transportation and Land Use Planning and the California Environmental Quality Act. (That’s kind of meta since it’s an act that references another act!)
Last week somebody asked me for material related to the Transportation Development Act of 1971, which was SB325 but also frequently called the Mills-Alquist-Deddeh Act. So looking for it requires a few different avenues and hoping people get it right. That’s easy.
This reminds me of some confusion I had recently when reading contemporary sources about California politics in the 1970s. They kept talking about the danger looming about “Jarvis Gann” in terms of the state’s finances. A little bit of context and knowledge of history makes it clear they’re talking about the 1978 ballot proposition Proposition 13 (colloquially known now as just Prop 13, there is only one Prop 13). But of course, growing up in a California where Prop 13 has been around the entire time, Howard Jarvis (seen above eating a big sandwich) and Paul Gann are sometimes obscured by it. (Prop. 13 did just turn 40, and it still is messing with the state is so many ways. The current teachers strike in Oakland is a symptom of it.)
I think there was a hope that linked data and semantic searching would make this all so easy. So that you wouldn’t have to know if you want the full discourse around Prop 13 in the mid to late 70s, you need to search “Jarvis Gann”. Or that if you want to know more about TDA before it passed that “Mills-Alquist-Deddeh” was the ticket (it rolls off the tongue). This leads me to a passion project I would love to tackle: Using text mining to curate resource guides and bibliographies on topics with evolving terminology.
Stay tuned.
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