Metadata and the Humanities

Karen Hellekson wrote an intriguing post recently, suggesting that humanities scholarship take some cues from the sciences when it comes to purposefully surrounding articles with descriptive titles and perhaps even abstracts and keywords. She reminds us that, you know, that would make the stuff easier to find. And when we’re drowning in scholarship, ease-of-use and ease-of-getting matters, especially if it’s true that only 10% of humanities articles are ever actually cited.

(Where did I read that recently? Ah, it’s actually worse than I remembered: Alex Reid cites a study that 93% of humanities research goes uncited. Ouch.)

Hellekson’s point is especially worth thinking about in the rhetoric and composition community, for two big reasons:

1. We straddle so oddly between humanities and social sciences, preparing MLA-style manuscripts for CCC and then preparing APA-style manuscripts and walking through the abstract-necessary, keyword-crucial Elsevier site for Computers and Composition.
2. We really, really love the cutesey titles.

And I use “cutesy” not disparagingly, but as someone who gets a kick out of the relentless wordplay summoned when a host of rhetoricians and writing teachers decides to do its very, very best to get a smile out of everyone who reads the title.

But at the same time, it’s true that I’ve seen myself fight against the tide in favor of clarity in title-writing. When submitting my first-est lengthy article of real scholarship to peer reviewed journals, I tried really hard to make the title work without a colon–not because I don’t appreciate colons in other titles, but because something inside of me didn’t like the idea of every title ever having a colon. (I landed on “Remix Literacy and Fan Compositions.”)

So I’m not sure. I want fellow rhet/compers to hear a complex message that goes something like, “Hey! Can you maybe continue to make me smile with your cleverness in titling scholarship, but can you try really hard to be straight-up clear, too? And, you know, that clarity is kind of more important.”

Side thought 1: does the presence of a discipline-specific, volunteer-driven citation organization like CompPile lessen the importance of metadata for us? A skillful citation-recorder should be able to skim an article, even with cutesy title and no keywords, and still associate the citation with a few helpful keywords for that database, right?

Side thought 2: I’m even writing this meandering post at all because I still remember a brief conversation I had about tagging with my expository writing students a few weeks ago. I was emphasizing (and this is going to be a remarkably unspecific, lousy summary) how Clay Shirky sees metadata as saving digital writing from the shackles of print-based models of organization. It’s tags, all the way down. (My class was a bit unimpressed by the concept.) And the more we find ways to use metadata systems that are tag-based but seamless for users–like mining clearly written titles for tagging info–the better our structures of organization will be. I think.

Secret Meanings

from Amazon

One of my favorite books growing up was Tricks and Pranks to Fool Your Friends, a compendium of card tricks, physical limitations, and mathematical wizardry that rewarded multiple rereads. (I recently honored its memory in a book chapter, for which I needed some random awesomeness to quote.)

I’m thinking about the book as part of my thinking on hidden meanings, which I’m starting to realize supply something like 90% of my daily pleasure. For instance:

• I love saying something that one person in the room really understands, while everyone else misunderstands it.
• I love watching Lost over and over, learning new things that the music is telling us and conceiving new theories (my most recent is the final comment on this post)–both of which give the added experience of a new layer of hidden meaning that not everyone gets to see.
• I love finding exciting verbal coincidences that are right under our noses, like surprisingly apt palindromes and abbreviations.

So what? Because in a sense, the section of expository writing I’m teaching this semester is an experiment in the purposeful layering of meaning. I’m basing the class on the template of a professor‘s class: basically, students choose an area in which they want to blog, and they actively read and write in that area, publicly, for 10 straight weeks, attenuating themselves to the conventions and skills in their chosen discourse community. It’s a lot of reading and a lot of writing, and I’m wildly impressed at their skill this far in.

But I’m especially excited by the secret, hidden meanings that no one gets to know about but us. Each week (again, this wasn’t originally my idea), they use a template from the week’s chapter in They Say, I Say, a book that very explicitly instructs writers how to refer to and respond to others in their writing community, and they also use a rhetorical term of the week, which I give them. So far we’ve been focusing on stylistic devices that can be put into a sentence or two (anaphora, asyndeton, aporia), but eventually we’ll get more complex, posting posts that very purposefully demonstrate a well-tuned understanding of kairos or develop  a strong ethos, and so on.

They mark the “terms of the week” using Diigo, a social bookmarking and web highlighting/annotating tool, saving their annotations just to our private class group. So with the Diigo toolbar installed, whenever I read a page that someone in our group has annotated or marked with a Diigo “sticky note” drawing attention to the term of the week, I see metadata that no one else on the web knows about–even the other participants in their chosen blogging community who (hopefully!) will also read their posts. It’s like we’re super spies, infiltrating bunkers of knowledge with hidden cameras in our lapels, speaking in our own hidden code that is technologically impervious to detection. (Or, er, the students are spies, and I’m the criminal mastermind friendly boss back at base.)

The effect, as a reader, is similar to hearing an inside joke at a party. I read sentences that feel especially resonant and speech-like and think, “Wow, that’s really moving!” and then I realize, “Oh! That’s the anaphora I assigned! Sweet!” It gives me a feeling of being in an in-club, even when I’m grading. I wonder if they feel any of this, or if it’s just classwork. (Most likely: a mix.) And I wonder if outsiders to the class but insiders to these blogging communities would get any kick at all out of knowing this stuff–say, if we invited them to join our Diigo group and install the toolbar. Maybe they’d feel like insiders too, or maybe they’d feel like we had just set up some tricks and pranks to fool them.