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ОглавлениеFostering an Understanding of the Value of Metadata in Digital Humanities
Hamilton College
DIGITAL HUMANITIES PROJECTS REQUIRE WIDE-RANGING skill sets and awareness of many tools and resources, including the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), digitization practices, geographic information systems (GIS), data visualization, and metadata. While digital humanities projects are usually produced by the combined effort of a number of experts in these fields, it is still imperative to introduce those new to digital humanities to a broad overview of many of these topics so that they are aware of the role these resources play in digital humanities and how these tools can be used to benefit their projects.1
Metadata is a crucial part of digital humanities because it provides a way of accessing and organizing data. Metadata provides key terms and phrases for finding digital objects, ranging from newspaper articles and essays to interviews, photographs, and videos. Adding metadata allows objects in a repository to be findable and improves their discoverability. It can be used to supplement full-text searching and adds value by correcting misspellings, supplementing abbreviations so that they are searchable, and adding alternate spellings to facilitate searching.2 Therefore, metadata is the foundation of the work that is done by scholars, allowing for the careful description of objects in ways that support new connections between objects and the analysis of items within a collection.
A basic understanding of metadata should be taught in all classes that are focused on developing skills in digital humanities in order to instill an early understanding of both the importance of metadata and the general principles of how to create metadata. In the past, metadata has been viewed primarily as librarians’ work; however, developing skills in metadata will allow those embarking on a journey into digital humanities to develop a deeper understanding of their data. The usefulness of this information literacy extends beyond digital humanities into the broader topic of digital scholarship. Developing a clear understanding of metadata while having the opportunity to create metadata is crucial to the development of a foundation for digital humanities scholars at all levels.
The following is a general suggested approach for a one-shot metadata-centric session in a digital humanities class. It may be adapted for use by librarians and professors who are seeking to educate students on how metadata is an important part of the digital humanities research that is being done, regardless of topical areas. This grounding of the discussion of metadata into the larger context of digital humanities will allow students to develop more comprehensive insights into the digital humanities projects they have reviewed in class, providing them with the ability to see the role that metadata plays in digital humanities projects.
SETTING THE STAGE
It is imperative to set the stage for a discussion about metadata with undergraduate students who are enrolled in an introduction to digital humanities course. Students may be intimidated upon first hearing that they will be working with metadata. While students may know the basic definition of metadata (i.e., “data about data”), this definition is insufficient because the word data can be vague to those who are new to the field of information. Instead, starting with what is familiar when introducing the topic to them, and using scaffolding to help them build from what they know to the unknown, will more quickly gain their interest.
There are several ways to accomplish this. One way that is frequently successful as an initial overture toward making them feel more comfortable is to try incorporating an example of the everyday organization of information using metadata that they create, and organize by, without even realizing it. One favorite question to pose is, “How do you organize your closet?” There are numerous ways of doing this (e.g., by color, by type of clothing item, by season, by style, by outfit, as well as by some combination of these), and getting students to realize that they are already working with and organizing objects using metadata is an eye-opening experience for many of them.
Another example that gets students thinking about metadata and how it exists in different forms depending on the object is an example involving cookie cutters. To start the discussion, a photograph of a dozen or so cookie cutters in various shapes, sizes, and colors is shown. The students are then presented with the discussion prompt of how they might organize them. Some possibilities include by color, by season (e.g., Christmas cookie cutters, Valentine’s Day cookie cutters), by size, and by type (e.g., depicting living animals, depicting humans, inanimate objects). This can also be done by dividing students into groups and having them physically manipulate the cookie cutters, which is especially useful for students who are tactile learners. These fun examples of organizing show students that creating metadata is not as intimidating as it might initially seem.
PRINCIPLES OF METADATA
Once the seed has been planted that students are already using metadata in their daily lives and that organizing information is the principle behind the creation of metadata, defining information is a good next step. One definition of information is the communication or reception of knowledge that exists in the mind of someone who understands the subject matter.3 Using a definition such as this can lead to a discussion that information has characteristics (e.g., size, creator, title) and those characteristics can be used to organize the various pieces of information about an object. These characteristics are then used to build a metadata schema.
Metadata is used to describe objects and to build relationships between objects. The cartoon by John Norris is a perfect example of the benefits of using metadata. (See fig. 7.1.) The top panel of this cartoon shows a user looking through an interface at objects that are filed into folders in drawers. The user is forced to look through these drawers to try to find the desired item, with the user having to select a single drawer for an item that has the ability to fit into two different drawers or that perhaps does not match any of the drawers available. This process is an inefficient method that leads to user frustration at not easily finding the desired item(s).
The bottom panel of the cartoon illustrates the difference when metadata is used for organizing objects. Instead of hunting through folders for objects that can only live in one place, the user quickly locates relevant items because the metadata brings together related items no matter where they are stored. Combining the earlier closet and cookie cutter organizational discussions with the cartoon’s illustrations allows the students to think about metadata through a more familiar lens and draws upon their personal experiences organizing information without realizing that they were already working with metadata.
Figure 7.1. John Norris, Folders vs. Metadata, https://www.flickr.com/photos/john-norris/5865469840. Used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license. J. Norris, 2011, “Folders vs. Metadata—Document Organization,” accessed June 22, 2018, http://john-norris.net/2011/06/23/document-organization-folders-vs-metadata/.
TRADITIONAL METADATA EXAMPLES
Because the students are now comfortable with the idea of metadata, it is now possible to start looking at some of the more traditional uses and applications of metadata, such as in the library catalog and databases that students may frequently use. By teasing apart a record in the local library catalog to show the various pieces of metadata that describe the item (e.g., title, author name in a specific format, date), they have an opportunity to see metadata in action. This can then be expanded on to show how metadata is used to build relationships among objects and make comparisons. There are books that share an author, multiple resources about the same subject, materials that are published by the same publisher in the same year, and so on. The idea of making these connections to build a collection of related material ties directly into the idea of collection building in digital humanities. The library catalog example can also lead to a discussion with students about creating metadata with an eye toward other people using it.
Timothy W. Cole highlights what makes “good” metadata that helps students think about how to build metadata for collections. In Cole’s words:
•“Good metadata should be appropriate to the materials in the collection, users of the collection, and intended, current and likely users of the digital object.
•Good metadata supports interoperability.
•Good metadata uses standard controlled vocabularies to reflect the what, where, when and who of the content.
•Good metadata includes a clear statement on the conditions and terms of use for the digital object.
•Good metadata records are objects themselves and therefore should have the qualities of good objects, including archivability, persistence, unique identification, etc. Good metadata should be authoritative and verifiable.
•Good metadata supports the long-term management of objects in collections.”4
CREATING METADATA
The final portion of a session on metadata and digital humanities focuses on hands-on practice creating metadata for a series of objects. It is beneficial to discuss with the professor any class projects that are already built into the course to see if there is a way to create an in-class metadata lab that helps support another project. If there is not one available, designing a project that presents the students with a set of objects that have some relationship to one another, along with a list of metadata fields to use to describe each object, is a good way to contain the exercise so that students do not need to spend the time trying to locate objects to build a collection.
One way to accomplish this task is to select a popular song and locate related items. Possible examples for the minicollection that is presented for metadata creation include a CD containing the original version of the song by the original performer, the original music video by the original performer on YouTube, the sheet music for the song, a cover of the song on YouTube as performed by another artist, and a mash-up (i.e., a song containing the piece mixed with another piece in a unique way). Students then decide on the metadata, such as a title, who the primary people are involved in the piece, what type of file it is, who the publisher is, keywords/tags that can be used to describe the item, and what relationships this item has to the other items in the collection.
After some time working through this exercise, the group comes back together to discuss the decisions they made in creating the metadata. This process of practicing building metadata gives students a chance to work with objects, to think about how to describe them in a way that is useful to other people, and to understand how the creation of metadata is a subjective and valuable contribution to digital humanities projects.
CONCLUSIONS
Metadata is not a subject that has traditionally been taught in classrooms as part of the typical set of skills students learn; however, developing a skill set with metadata is valuable for undergraduate and graduate students, particularly those who are becoming active in the field of digital humanities. Introducing students to metadata will enable them to develop a firmer grounding in an understanding of how archives and collections are organized and findable through metadata. Certain students may even develop an interest in becoming involved in creating metadata for an active digital humanities project after this initial overview session. With a carefully guided approach that provides scaffolding to introduce students to metadata in familiar contexts through creating metadata for a preselected set of items, students can learn the value of metadata and develop a deeper understanding of the role it plays in digital humanities.
NOTES
1. Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp, Digital Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
2. Sheila Bair and Sharon Carlson, “Where Keywords Fail: Using Metadata to Facilitate Digital Humanities Scholarship,” Journal of Library Metadata 8, no. 3 (2008): 249–262.
3. Daniel Joudrey, Arlene Taylor, and Katherine Wisser, The Organization of Information, 4th ed. (Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited, 2017).
4. Timothy W. Cole, “Creating a Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections.” First Monday 7, nos. 5–6 (2002).
