While doing this week’s readings, the article introducing metadata immediately caught my eye. I had always heard references of this abstract concept known as metadata, but I never truly understood what it was or how it could possibly be relevant in my own life. In Anne J. Gilliland’s article “Setting the Stage” from Introduction to Meta, Gilliland describes the “big picture” definition of metadata as “the sum total of what one can say about any information object—[anything that can be addressed and manipulated as a discrete entity by a human being or an information system]—at any level of aggregation.” At this point, I still was not completely positive what the purpose of metadata was. As I read further, Gilliand explains, “Cultural heritage information professionals such as museum registrars, library catalogers, and archival processors often apply the term metadata to the value-added information that they create to arrange, describe, track, and otherwise enhance access to information objects and the physical collections related to those objects.” Finally, this I could understand, since I do exactly this everyday.
A fun-fact that you may not know about me is that I run a “food-blog Instagram” account. Basically, twice a day I upload deliciously sinful food pictures onto an Instagram account, which I use solely for this purpose. In each post, I geo-tag the location of the restaurant where the food is from, tag the restaurant’s own account, use specific hashtags to describe the food, and tag the user who deserves photo credit. Every step of this process categorizes each specific picture into its own unique domain on Instagram. As seen in the image above, the picture is geo-tagged at Novel Café in Westwood and the restaurant itself is hash-tagged (#novelcafe). In every picture I also include a “hashtag overload,” of other food-blog accounts’ personal hashtags. This allows other accounts access to my photos and have photos appear in their own Instagram domain. All of these tags on Instagram contain photos compiled into an archive from all of the different users who utilized the same tags, which allows easy access to specific images by searching for the desired tag. These tags allow users to archive, arrange, describe, and track the progress and information provided in each image.
My food Instagram provides me with a glimpse of the importance of metadata in everyday life. According to Gilliland, “Medata establishes and documents the context of the content; identifies and exploits the structural relationships that exist within and between information objects; [and] provides a range of intellectual access points for an increasingly diverse range of users.” As seen, metadata is essential in supplying a resource to create structure in our digital world.
Works Cited:
Anne Gilliland, “Setting the Stage,” from Murtha Baca, ed., Introduction to Metadata (Los Angeles: Getty, 2008)
