18.299 metadata necessities

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 299.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

         Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 07:37:37 +0100
         From: lachance_at_origin.chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
         Subject: metadata necessities was Re: 18.292 loss of information

   Willard,

   Brad Brace's hearty endorsement of Michael Hart's call for uploading

> > The solution is simple. . .put the data out there for the
> > public...
>
>
> Exactly! This was one of the supposed, heady, early precepts
> of the Net, along with "information wants to be free."

   raises, for me, the general question of associating metadata with digital
   objects and the narrower technical question of the use of comments in
   human-readable files.

   A recent discussion of a data recovery episode at jill/txt [Jill Walker's
   blog] http://huminf.uib.no/~jill/index.php?p=1065 leads me to ask if
   humanities scholars in their pedagogy stress the use of comments as a
   place to embed "signature" information such as names, dates and places.
   Comments, of course, have been exploited in other ways by some writers for
   the digital medium. Comments become a spot or zone of composition
   functioning almost like a recto/verso in invisible ink exposable with the
   correct technique. But I digress. Or maybe not. The invisible ink and
   rector/verso metaphors might prove useful in exposing students to the
   importance of documentation both for one's personal archives and for
   public distribution/harvesting.

--
Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance
A calendar is like a map. And just as maps have insets, calendars in the
21st century might have 'moments' expressed in flat local time fanning out
into "great circles" expressed in earth revolution time.