They make the following claims about metadata:
- The lesson here is that it is not enough to simply ask what the archive contains; you must also ask how that material can be arranged so as to enable certain lines of inquiry.
- This assumption about the future of scholarly work raises important questions about its shelf life—about how academic projects are organized, accessed, and archived—actions which fall under the all-encompassing umbrella of “metadata”
- What becomes absolutely transparent in these intersections is the actual work of historical knowledge-making which involves not simply “digging up” artifacts and placing them accordingly in the container of linear time, but making self-conscious decisions about how that artifact is to be organized alongside others to produce a narrative and an argument about the present.
- The application of metadata to an informatic object is an attempt to situate the object within a larger system—to position it in terms of an extant or emerging network.
- Such metadata can be read critically and, therefore, requires that the reader understand the rhetorical situation of metadata that is, itself, argumentative and not merely descriptive. The rhetorical situation of each instance of metadata, then, must be understood in order to reach a useful rhetorical analysis of the metadata as discourse.
Ultimately, they argue, “If we are to consider metadata to be a key concern of the new work of composing, then metadata must also be accounted for in the new work of reading, especially as digital remediation of analog artifacts open new venues for public deliberation and discourse where a textual artifact is never ‘closed’ or ‘finished.’”
Key Terms
- Standard: “is any set of agreed-upon rules for the production of (textual or material) objects….Standards span more than one community of practice (or site of activity); they are deployed in making things work together over distance and heterogeneous metrics and have significant inertia”
- SITM: I see “readymade” standards as general standards that have general applications, which have emerged over long periods of time, and “Standards in the Making” (SITM) as those standards that students synthesize by adapting readymade standards to specific rhetorical situations.