Meta-What? Archives, Data, and Metadata

“Metadata is much like a love note to the future.”

It’s a data that describes a data for people interested on that data. Metadata answers the who, what, and when of an archive, pictures, websites, videos, and audios. It tells the researcher everything they need to know about a particular data including its summery and file size.

This past week in Hacking the Humanities, we were able to familiarize ourselves with the databases and back ends of WordPress. In that process, we were able to look at the metadata that make up the themes and structures of the website. For our upcoming project, we will be constructing, on SketchUp, buildings of Carleton College. Some of these building are still standing today and others are not.

For this particular project, I’ll be working on the Allen Memorial Hospital. In my search for information on this house, I went to the Carleton photo archive and searched for a few pictures. The three pictures I found had metadata that entails the information for when the data was taken, information about the sponsor, creator, and description of the house. To acquire the metadata and the data itself, I had to look up the information on the Carleton College digital collection. Once I found the pictures, I first downloaded the picture and saved it on the google document. After that, I  started transferring the metadata information onto the google spreadsheet. Once I was done with the first one, I went ahead and repeated the process for two other data. All of this can be tedious. But using this information from the Carleton archive, I am now able to have a more depth analysis of a data I would otherwise not have had on regular search.

In my previous researches, I never really paid much attention to the metadata of a data. I truly did not even understand what metadata was. The most research I’ve done is google, scholarly searches, and library. Even then, to find details of a work, I would just look at citations and references. Now that I think about it, references and citations of a work could be a metadata. However, it was never this time consuming (although this was not terribly time consuming.). When I had to gather citations and references, I could always just use Easybib or other similar sites to do my automatic MLA or ASA format citations. Where as this data collection process was manual and took a little bit of longer time. Regardless, I’m really looking forward to the outcomes of  this project. It’s really intriguing that now, through technology and our intelligence, we are able to recreate and duplicate the outside world. The fact that we are able to rebuild things that no longer stand through digitization and the computer is beautiful.

All in all, studying the metadata of a data to accumulate and collect information can be tiring, but in the end worth it. Metadata is awesome. In fact, I have a cheesy metadata pickup line you can use to impress that special someone:

“Hey, your profile and mine seem pretty compatible…wanna see if we interoperate?”

 

nicolas

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