Week 2&3: Please Write It Down/Metadata

Jekyll , Update / November 16, 2021 / 2 Comments

The article “Please Write it Down: Design and Research in Digital Humanities” by Trevor Owens speaks of the importance and benefits to digital humanists of writing. While documenting is a necessary part of digital humanities this is not what he places importance on. He says that “while making a project one will go through a reflective process which led to the creation of the code and is the most viable communication of that argument”. He also suggested that at the end of the project write about “what you wanted to accomplish, what actually happened, and what you learned from the process”. The main point I got from him was that it is important to have a record of the thought process/logic behind a project. What led to this, why this is important and why did you think of it? This is valuable information to have, the thought behind the steps taken to complete a project is pertinent in the understanding of the project. Also, writing about what you learnt is important. I think it leads to a greater understanding of what you did and without it it becomes easier to forget what you did and lose the knowledge you gained from the project.

Oftentimes in projects it can be hard to document what you did, why you did it and what you learned from it. When rushing to complete the project once we get the result we want we move to the next task or prepare to relax. However while writing may seem like extra unimportant work to some, it can save countless hours. In the beginning of my coding journey I did not leave comments in my work and that was to my detriment. You should understand that it is very likely that similar projects will come up, and seeing the reasoning to your past work while also remembering the goal, process and result can save hours in thinking about the logic behind a new project or process of doing a new project.

Owen also believes that the sharing of these writings can help others become better designers and I fully agree. If a designer can look at others designs and see why they did something it teaches them a more valuable lesson than how to do it. Knowing why you do something also teaches you when to do it.

In week three I learnt about metadata. Metadata is data about data. We learnt about three types of metadata: descriptive, structural, and administrative.

Descriptive allows for discovery and identification and contains keywords that allow you to find relevant information when researching on the web. Dublin core is a scheme of descriptive metadata.

Structural metadata is data about the structure of the data for example pages in a chapter. Administrative metadata includes the “data, which deals with intellectual property rights, and metadata, which contains information needed to archive and preserve a resource.” 

In the reading we learnt more about the importance of metadata. Metadata aids in “organizing facilitating interoperability and legacy resource integration, providing digital identification, and supporting archiving and preservation.”

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