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Monday, October 15, 2007
Metadata Plus Shakespeare’s Afterlife
I had a good time at the ALSC conference. Our seminar went very well. We had, sadly, a few last minute drop-outs - including one due to car accident: best wishes to those involved. But we filled up all the chairs, and some of the audience members stepped up to discuss vigorously. And we had no crazy people (that I noticed.) And we had a few fairly sharp exchanges and disagreements, which kept it from being some warm, fuzzy ‘we all like e-publishing, right?’ group-hug. Here’s a question that came up but didn’t really get enough discussion, I thought - but perhaps it isn’t really the sort of thing one can answer off the cuff without thinking about a lot of details. The web buzzes and thrums with lots of interesting, innovative projects. Numerous universities and colleges offer good things that are, in many cases, free for all. Audio, video, text, archival materials. What sort of metadata net will eventually cover all this? At present there is a hodge-podge. Example: UC Berkeley has a YouTube page. How do you find all these wheels, avoid reinventing wheels someone else already built, so forth? In a sense the answer has to be: it hasn’t shaken out yet. Certain forms will take hold, people will gravitate to certain successful modes. But here is a practical, intermediate question: should humanists get much more serious about providing their own metadata? (For example, when o-when will I find the time to muck out the Valve’s useless category set?) Taxonomies, folksonomies? There are serious issues here. Whatever comes next, good metadata will be quite crucial to it. What graduate students in the humanities are being trained to provide it, or even think about what needs to be provided?
The best paper I heard at the conference - being from Singapore, I slept through most of them in my hotel room - was Jeffrey Knight, “Of Shreds and Patches: Shakespeare’s Afterlife in Books”. (I’m told this session will eventually be podcast. If so, I’ll link to it then.) I consider myself moderately competent to bandy about Shakespeare and history-of-the-book talk. But I was quite gobsmacked at what Knight had to say. Basically, his subject was: how did people use their books? The answer: until the 1750’s (I’m a bit hazy remembering the dates of specific examples discussed in the talk) they remixed them. It was remix culture as a mix of unabashed personalization and use-the-whole-pig frugality, if you will. If you liked a play - or a scene from a play - or a few sonnets - you would cut them out, bind them together with some other stuff you liked or had need for - a few recipes, your commonplace book, your own poems, law book material. Of course we all know that it used to be that you bound your own books, or had them bound. You just bought the paper from the bookseller, not a pre-bound book. But I wasn’t aware that, as a result, any given bound thing you happened to reach down from someone’s shelf, or out from underneath a child who was using it as a booster seat, or from behind a door it was holding open, would be quite likely to be a strikingly miscellaneous affair, in terms of its contents. Plus you obviously wrote all over all of it, because paper isn’t cheap.
Then later, when the book market started to reward values of integrity and purity (maybe we’re talking post 1750 here?) entrepreneurs and librarians started to reassemble ... well, to make a long story short, it would be as if album purists started to rebuild whole albums by buying old iPods and breaking down the personal playlists and so forth. The entrepreneurs did it because they could sell a pure, bleached Shakespeare for more than they could sell a half Shakespeare plus 10 recipes or whatever. The librarians were cataloguing things and so they couldn’t make much of these personalized monsters.
Quite possibly I’m misremembering or exaggerating some details. I’ll try to get the text of the talk and reread it. If need be, I’ll correct what I just wrote.
It reminded me of this old post of mine. Gutenberg elegies predicated on the badness of remix culture, when it would seem early Gutenberg culture was remix culture. Curious.
Comments
Your ‘metadata’ questions strike a chord with me, certainly, particularly with regard to blogs; as someone who has arrived belatedly to the blogging party, I have been finding it quite challenging tracking down what already been set up, said, and discussed, especially as debates often track back and forth between (or cross-reference) the comments sections of different blogs. Meta-data sites that I come across (such as blogscholar’s academic blogging portal, or the Complete Review’s list of literary weblogs) can’t pretend to be comprehensive and have understandable trouble staying up to date; following endless ‘blogrolls’ is one of the best methods I’ve found for locating sites likely to be of interest to me, but trawling through their archives to get caught up (if such a notion exists in this medium) is exhausting. (If there’s a great resource out there that, say, indexes multiple blog archives in some useful way, I’d be thrilled to learn about it!). As for managing our own metadata, through how we label posts, for instance, it’s hard to know the best way to do that: is it better to be highly specific so people who are wondering what we talk about can scan it and get a pretty good sense right away, or to use larger groupings to keep the list of topics shorter and hope interested people will come in and see for themselves? Or do bloggers not intend for their archived posts to be accessed in these ways by latecomers: once something’s off the front page, is it essentially retired from service?
"What sort of metadata net will eventually cover all this?”
Just make sure that Google can index everything.
I know that sounds completely flippant, reliant on a single private company, etc., but seriously the “audience” for search results through Google is so much larger than any other that it’s the single most important thing to do.
So, what’s Kotsko like face-to-face?
A few years ago I was doing some historical research at the Bancroft Library at Berkeley and requested some materials that were cataloged as “newspaper clippings” (or something like that) from the late 19th century. When they arrived, they were clippings, but they were not loosely collected: someone had taken old government publications - thick bound volumes like legislative journals - torn out the original pages, and then pasted in the clippings on new pages. Very few of the clippings showed the date or the publication name. I don’t think I ended up using them in the paper I was working on.