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.