“Metadata” is data about data. The authors of “Standards in the Making: Composing with Metadata in Mind” use it to describe the ways that information is organized--which, they contend, is both a comment on the information itself and an indication of the way in which information should be processed.
The authors come from four different fields of study: geographic information systems, American studies, rhetoric, and the digital humanities. The rhetoric scholar was the one who raised the question about the “shelf life” of digital scholarship. He stated that clear metadata standards are important because they allow scholars to easily access other works. The GIS scholar mentioned that metadata is an “afterthought” in his own field and that this fact is in need of a change. Overall, the importance of taking metadata seriously was something that came up frequently.
The authors primarily used the tagging/commenting system on Flickr to describe the affordances presented by metadata. Within the Flickr system, they observed the importance of collaboration in metadata as users debated about how particular images should be categorized. They also found that the platform used to present data can impact how it is read and that systems that allow for a multitude of loose associations between items (Flickr is an example of this, since users can tag images with as many words as they think are relevant to the image) allow for the serendipitous discovery of new associations.
Metadata, especially in digital composition, can affect whether a work is easy or difficult to navigate as well as the manners in which it can be or should be navigated.
--By Sam Hankins
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