This year, I will be attending the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing Conference (SHARP) for the first time. The conference will be held in Victoria, Canada from June 9-12, in conjunction with DHSI 2017. My Georgia Tech colleague Kate Holterhoff and I have put together a panel entitled, "NonStandard Metadata and the (New Media) Book," described below.
PANEL DESCRIPTION: Non-Standard Metadata and the (New Media) Book
In his contribution to the Essential Knowledge Series (MIT Press), Jeffrey Pomerantz sets out to define, describe, and historicize metadata -- a concept familiar to library scientists, archivists, and database designers that, in the wake of Edward Snowden’s NSA whistle-blowing, has recently caught the popular attention and concern of the public. Describing metadata as essentially data about data -- that is, data that informs and describes another, more “primary” data object -- Pomerantz’s text walks readers through the standards (Dublin Core, VRA, or Library of Congress) by which metadata management is controlled. Though Pomerantz never explicitly makes the claim -- indeed, he notes that metadata standards are themselves interpretive categories that have been adopted simply to make information manageable -- the existence and persistence of such standards throughout the world, combined with their ability to invisibly structure our daily lives in data, suggest that there is a kind of stability and clarity to structures of descriptive metadata. That these structures have become increasingly visible as precisely that which expose “truths” through patterns of human habits and behaviors (including and especially those “truths” we would prefer to keep hidden), this stability produces as much anxiety and fear at information exposure, as calming clarity at its management.
In this panel, we trouble this narrative of stability, exploring historical and contemporary practices of metadata production that explicitly undermine or challenge the assumed sovereignty of descriptive metadata structures. This exploration begins with Jessica Roberson’s work historicizing contemporary anxieties about metadata structures and usages through the material practices of assembly, collage, and labeling that accompanied the production of intertextual collages, such as the many amateur herbariums, albums, and scrapbooks, generated during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Expanding on this historical view, Kate Holterhoff’s talk examines the role of the digital archivist when it comes to encoding illustrations within highly interpretive, descriptive metadata. In particular, she examines implications and methods by which the digital archivist can create descriptive metadata structures that extend beyond the obvious, objective, or empirical, to include interpretation and community building. Finally, Sarah Lozier-Laiola’s talk takes the politics of metadata structures as its primary focus, asking if it re-encodes data objects within a technologically rigid “master narrative” system, or if it is possible to use the self-reflexivity of metadata in the same way that postmodern authors use the self-reflexivity of meta-narratives: to draw attention to the very presence of data systems, thereby disrupting the naturalized, seeming omnipotence of big data structures today.
In this panel, we trouble this narrative of stability, exploring historical and contemporary practices of metadata production that explicitly undermine or challenge the assumed sovereignty of descriptive metadata structures. This exploration begins with Jessica Roberson’s work historicizing contemporary anxieties about metadata structures and usages through the material practices of assembly, collage, and labeling that accompanied the production of intertextual collages, such as the many amateur herbariums, albums, and scrapbooks, generated during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Expanding on this historical view, Kate Holterhoff’s talk examines the role of the digital archivist when it comes to encoding illustrations within highly interpretive, descriptive metadata. In particular, she examines implications and methods by which the digital archivist can create descriptive metadata structures that extend beyond the obvious, objective, or empirical, to include interpretation and community building. Finally, Sarah Lozier-Laiola’s talk takes the politics of metadata structures as its primary focus, asking if it re-encodes data objects within a technologically rigid “master narrative” system, or if it is possible to use the self-reflexivity of metadata in the same way that postmodern authors use the self-reflexivity of meta-narratives: to draw attention to the very presence of data systems, thereby disrupting the naturalized, seeming omnipotence of big data structures today.
