What I Listen to While I'm Curating Metadata

Last week's post was a little bleak. I apologize. I thought it would be good to lighten this one up with some tunes! And some podcasts! I've really been into podcasts that last two or so years, and I mainly listen to them when I'm cooking, cleaning, or on long trips back home. I never knew they would be so helpful when it comes to writing metadata. They make time go by so much faster, and works as nice background noise which weirdly helps me to concentrate. 

Also this week, I was able to get some help (thanks Dr. French!) concerning that 15-20 page paper that's fast apporaching, and now I have a better idea of what my topic is going to focus on. I'm going to keep reading and write back next week exactly what the paper will be on. I'm sure you will all be waiting with bated breath.

Without further ado here's some of my favorite podcasts to listen to while curating metadata (and a song or two).

1. The Read

Pop culture, love advice, and a lot of laughs from two queer people of color. The title of the podcast comes from 1980s New York ball culture slang "to read" or reading. Here's Dorian Corey explaining the difference reading and shade from the famous documentary by Jennie Livingston Paris Is Burning. Seeing as shade has come into mainstream prominence, this video is defintiely necessary for those you wondering if you're using "throwing shade" incorrectly. Hint: you probably are.

2. Another Round

One of Buzzfeed's podcasts, Another Round features Heben Nigatu and Tracy Clayton who talk systemic racism, their hatred of New York City squirrels, and pop culture with visiting guests such as J. Smoove, Issa Rae, and Roxanne Gay.

3. Mmhmm, Girl

Lola and Babs are two Bay Area girls who dish about celebrity gossip, current events, pop culture, sexuality and the like. They leave no stone unturned and are not afraid to go there. I usually have to refrain from busting out laughing while I'm in the office anytime I Iisten to their podcast. 10/10 would recommend. 

Songs:

1. I Knew You Were Trouble Jersey Club Mix

2. We Are Young Jersey Club Mix

So that's it. That's what I've been listening to these past few weeks. Any suggestions?

See you next week!

I'm Not Exactly Meta about Metadata

This week, like last week, and the week before that, was—as usual—really tedious and underwhelming. It becomes increasingly difficult to find ways to cope with an internship that as it turns out, isn’t the best fit for you. I obviously knew this coming into it, but I was honestly just grateful to have internship after the others  fell through at the end of the last semester. I took out a loan to go to grad school, and Sallie Mae definitely told me herself that if for any reason I wasn’t enrolled in a certain number of credits a semester she would ask for all her coins back, which, uh, I don’t have.

So to avoid that I thought it would be cool to continue with the Oviedo History Harvest project, seeing it through to the (digitized) end. But I also wanted to develop practical skills. Now that I’m entering the adult world—eek, do I count as an adult? Quarter life crisis ensuing in 3…2….1— I feel that its important for me to have skills that aren’t just reading and writing. How does that differentiate me from anybody else in my program or any other History graduate programs across the United States. We can all read and write and think critically. That’s why were in grad school. What can I offer, what skills do I have that will make me marketable so that I can have a career that doesn’t involve wearing an itchy uniform and asking people if they want to try our new double-stuffed Oreo McFlurry? 

Listen, my family doesn’t exactly believe in failure. There is no doubt, an ulcer forming in stomach because of it. Also a lot of general anxiety disorder and a little OCD thrown in for good measure. I say all of this to say that curating metadata brings up a lot of my anxities, fear of failure being one of them. If I mess this up—and fail this internship in the process—RICHES will probably find another intern to fix it up, no biggie. But, it really stresses me out that I can’t seem to get the hang of this or the reading material. What does that say about me as an student? Am I even cut out to be an historian?

I think a huge issue here is that curating metadata doesn’t stimulate me. Being in front of a computer doing repetitive work never came to mind when I thought about what I would do as an historian—writing monographs aside—but I knew there would be times where I would have to do things that I didn’t like. That’s a part of life obviously. Everybody does things they don’t like. That’s ok. 

So what do I want to do as an historian? I want to challenge people; make them uncomfortable. I want to make someone reassess everything they think they know about history and to question it. But most importantly I want to help make a difference. I’m totally an annoying social justice warrior.  When I think about the first internship I had planned to do—and will hopefully do eventually—I think about the opportunity I had to help people who would otherwise not be able to save and preserve their church. It’s these real world connections that drew me to public history, not theory and rhetoric.

 I think about what’s happened in Charleston, what continues to happen every day in this country where people who look like me are gunned down by police and average citizen alike, with no retribution. Where does metadata fit into that? Where is my connection? 

Sorry for the depressing post. This week was rough. 

Porsha 

Curating Metadata as Told Through Nene Leakes Gifs

Welcome back to the ongoing struggle that is me curating metadata. In this week's installment I'm going to discuss some of the material Dr. French was kind enough to send to me (THANK YOU!!!). It's cleared up some of my confusion when it comes to certain aspects of metadata, but it's also raised some questions. Within the context of historical scholarship assessing data, as well as the data that explains said data, i.e. metadata, warrants its own scholarships and typology in order to categorize and understand it. This allows historians to better review and assess the effectiveness of digital works.

Professor William Thomas created a chart that I feel can explain this much better than I can :The Chart

Working in the digital realm allows historians to create a number of deliverables that can range from interactive websites to a simple Youtube video. Evaluating these projects is the focus of much digital scholarship because the digital can create new forms of inquiry that were once unthinkable before the advent of 21st century technology.

Disseminating this information to those who are outside the field of digital humanities is also a major objective. But based on the amount of technical terminology that the field uses, that's definitely going to be difficult, because some of these articles read like a physics textbook--which I just barely passed in undergrad, And like me, most people who choose history as their profession, math and science? Not exactly our forte.

But I'm just gonna keep on trucking through this digital history thing. If I can't be the Beyonce of Metadata I can at least be Rihanna. Or Nicki Minaj. Anybody but Keri Hilson.



So, this week I worked on about 4 Microsoft Excel spreadsheets of metadata. And all of them were wrong.

 So as I'm redoing the metadata sheets, the computer I'm working on decides to update. And what I mean by update is exit out of everything I've worked on and shut down completely.

Luckily, Windows did not forsake me for being a Mac user and autosaved my work.

 But then I found out I still had more metadata sheets to fix. 

When the computer freezes and so I can't redo the data sheets.

When the computer starts working again, but now google maps won't let me get the coordinates for the GeoChrons tab on the excel sheet.

When I finally get the coordinates I need, but now there's not enough information on the item I'm writing metadata for in a book or online so my description tab isn't descriptive enough.

When I finally complete a sheet and its mostly correct. 

But then I remember I have thousands of digitized items I still have to write metadata for in less than a month and a half.

Until next week.

The Devil is in the Metadata

This week I was not able to go into the office to work on new data sheets, so this blogpost will mainly consist of  metadata and theory which is what I've been reading this past week. By now you have probably stopped reading and I can't blame you and if you know someone who would want to read all these books and journal articles dealing with all these abstract concepts please let me know so they could do this instead of me, but alas, dear reader, you have stopped reading and can't help me.

But honestly, somebody come help me

Moving on, I was definitely at a loss when it came to finding the necessary articles/books to supplement my hands own learning through the internship. I previously took a Digital History course this past Spring semester where I learned the difference between digital humanities and digital history (a field within digital humanities). However, both disciplines are inextricably link, and through a new methodology, argues Joshua Sternfeld, Senior Program Officer at the NEH, could create a set of shared terminology for the evaluation of "digital historical representations", including GIS, digital archives, and mobile apps. This is known as digital historiography.

Digital historiography is defined as "...the interdisciplinary study of the interaction of digital technology with historical practice."(Source) Using selection, search, and metadata as the foundation, digital historiography will help in assessing the effectiveness of digital historical representations in terms of communicating historical knowledge.

...what?

And because I know that you have stopped reading, I can stop acting like I know what any of that means. Granted I believe I have a general idea, but as a baby graduate student I always assume that I know nothing, and that whatever I do know are fairy tales and fallacies concocted by a lying brain fairy.

For the purpose of this post, and the eventual 15-20 page historiographical paper that is due at the end of this internship, I'm going to articulate my understanding so that I can improve on it later.

Me thinking about that paper tbh

I believe what Sternfeld is arguing is that digital historiography as a theory would allow historians, digital or otherwise, to have an ethical set of guidelines in which to evaluate digital mediums of history. Digital historians need a way to communicate things like apps and geospatial renderings of a 18th century farm house in a way that is scholarly, yet accessible to their colleagues and others who do not work in the digital realm. Historians have long worked in the medium of monographs and physical books, but now with the advent of certain technologies, it is imperative that historians begin using the digital to not only display their work, but use technology to further their work in ways that were not thought possible even a decade ago.

So, yeah. That's all I got.

Still not the Beyonce of metadata, but I'll get there one day.