At the risk of offering up the same letter twice, I’m going to revisit the Nobel Prize winners this week, because the question I asked last week:
3. How are this year's winners going to be added to the canon? (Analysis from reading the news and citation)
flowed into a lesson I needed to give the new team members. While I’ll say it does put us in a somewhat heartless and mercenary position, I don’t get natural transitions like this often, and it pushed my ideas for other subjects on this off the page.
By publishing in the middle of Nobel Prize week about Nobel Prize week, I missed the key award which will have resonance with quiz bowl literature canon in future.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c206djljel1o
It’s edifying to see that basically everything I wrote last week, viewed as a template prediction of what will happen, happened and will be useful, just that the details needed to be decided. The Vegetarian previously entered as an answer due to the Man Booker prize. With Han Kang being the first South Korean and Korean-language writer to win the prize, these will be key facts for question writers to include for subsequent years, and this will probably elevate The Vegetarian to higher prominence.
The mention of the Man Booker prize allowed me to highlight the list of significant awards and prizes in the team’s Google Drive. I had just cleaned it up, and added information on the EGOT awards which has seen a boomlet in recent years that would be useful to them.
The one problem we’ll see is that it may be drowned out of long-term prominence due to the fact that Han Kang’s works are entering from the long tail of frequency lists, and most of the top literature subjects have centuries of lead. Han Kang’s debut works were published in 1993, which is almost contemporaneous with the first tournaments added to Frequency List computations.
As I laid this out for the team, I did do a comparison to the other awards given out, and made a note that the Peace Prize was significant but I didn’t think it was going to be as notable for them as the Lit Prize. This may seem rough and mercenary of me, but the likelihood of Han Kang being a common answer in ten years versus Nihon Hidankyo being a common answer, and it all comes down to the lack of it being uniquely identifying.
Uniquely Identifying clues (not abbreviated because that wouldn’t be uniquely identifying) is the idea that at least one clue in a question must point at exactly one answer. You can have other clues in the question which can point to multiple answers, but without a uniquely identifying clue at the beginning of the question it is not answerable.
As noted by Yogesh Raut in a facebook post, this is the eighth time advocates of nuclear disarmament have won the Nobel Peace Prize. The fact that there are seven predecessors states the importance of it in the real world, but muddies the message if you are trying to present it in quiz bowl. A clue about a Nobel Laureate for nuclear disarmament might be uniquely identifying, but only to someone with perfect information. For someone with ordinary knowledge, the clue could be ambiguous. This is something that makes questions frustrating when these sort of clues are used, without making the question wrong.
There are ways to write about nuclear disarmament in the context of the Nobel Prize, but they’re going to be bonuses, and they’re going to be needing to hook the idea into uniquely identifying answers in different ways. For instance, among the winners in this subset are Linus Pauling (a two-time winner), and Alma Myrdal (the only winner married to another Nobel Laureate who didn’t share the field with their partner) Just as the Pugwash conference was a hook in 1995 questions I needed to know, the Nihon Hidankyo will be something you’ll need to know for a short time before it fades.
There are other reasons to think that it might stick as a staple, there’s a single word clue that could lead to it: “hibakusha,” a Japanese term for survivors of Hiroshima or Nagasaki, which is the sort of hook which works for shorter questions and gives players a trigger point. But such one-word associative clues tend to be frowned upon by some writers at higher levels, and that’s going to restrict the use of this in questions. (The logic of this being that if it’s obvious there’s a one-word clue for something, it moves to the end of the question because everyone who is an expert player recognizes it’s an obvious one-word clue, well before it is established as a last clue.)
Uniquely identifying clues are much easier to process in questions, because you don’t have to tightly distinguish your clues to the finest detail all the way through the question, but also in your teaching of the concept in practice.
Firsts are always uniquely identifying. And with Han Kang being the first writer in the Korean language to win the award, that’s a hook to connect the question.
Onlies are uniquely identifying. (Onlies are just firsts that have been for so long they’ve lost their recency bias.) Until recently, The Vegetarian was the only work of Han Kang translated into English, so that book’s details become key to asking the question. And onlies limit the amount of detail someone needs to consider to write or to answer.
The uniquely identifying argument from this put me in a mind that I had to teach it this week, as one of the things I forgot in the list of universals from week 238. So to do that, I segued into it from discussing Han Kang, and went into the most uniquely identifying, orderly table we have (states and capitals.) I then handed them a basic pocketmod (See Week 235) with two pages tied up with states, capitals, and nicknames, and the rest filled with slightly less uniquely identifying information. And with that I had pulled all I could out of two events.
I’ll have to address this more fully later, but I was surprised to see the announcement of the return of Africa Challenge to the air. In terms of significant turning points in quiz bowl history, that program basically realigned the format wars of the 90’s into a new equilibrium. Recently, I had seen news accounts of quiz bowl events in several African nations for high school, and this looks like it should both bring interest at the college level, and provide an additional goal for the high school events I had been tracking.