Metadata Minion

“Pictures into Words” by Brian Stewart describes a study comparing user indexing, i.e. crowdsourced tagging, with professional indexing. The article first summarizes Panofsky’s and Shatford’s methods for classifying images. Panofsky outlined three levels of subject matter/meaning: Pre-iconographical description (objects or events)  Iconographical analysis (themes) Iconographical interpretation (meaning)  Shatford emphasized two dimensions of images, ‘of’ and ‘about’ (sometimes called an image’s ofness and aboutness .) Shatford also defined four facets of an image: who, what, where, and when. Stewart argues that indexers have traditionally taken a positivist approach by labeling mostly specific, objective subjects. Today, however, users are in greater need of abstract subjects (interpretive indexing). The article gives the example of abstract subjects like “happy” or “peace.” Part I of the study examined 11 professional indexers. Stewart broke down the subject t...

Archivists in the digital age are seeing an exponentially increasing amount of data with a decreasing lifespan. In “Preservation Challenges in the Digital Age,” Bernadette Houghton addresses this fundamental problem and ten challenges facing archivists. The difference between print technology and digital technology is that books both store and represent text and are relatively stable.  With digital technology, the storage and representation of text is done in separate operations, that is, text is encoded and then retrieved for use through various mediums. Robert Darnton talks about this concept in The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future. Archivists must preserve digital material itself and the infrastructure that renders the material readable. Houghton also introduces a third aspect, that of preserving the original user experience. The first example I thought of was playing Sonic the Hedgehog on computers and keyboards from the late 1990s. Houghton’s ten challenges are summar...