The Best of Urban Semiotic, Volume 2 (2007-2012)

Berg and Goorman use their case study to propose a law of medical information: Both these studies of medical data are pursuing questions not addressed by Latour, but his analytical tools help direct the questions nonetheless. Coopmans touches on this process by looking at the sociotechnical configuration that supports the interoperability of medical images across contexts of production and interpretation.

Studies of semantic interoperability Howarth ; Zeng and Chan inquire into both sides of the process, but when semantics is understood as a subset of pragmatics, the focus of the analysis will of necessarily shift. Studies of data and metadata interoperability would need to expand their purview beyond the analysis of semantic equivalents to inquire into underlying pragmatic relations that enable the communication of semantic content.

Paul Kockelman and Anya Bernstein do just this in their discussion of the semiotic technologies of temporal reckoning that determine the relative portability of meaning beyond particular contexts. What the expressions communicate across contexts, however, varies greatly depending on their indexical ties to the events of speaking and speakers, as well as the spread of the semiotic conventions used to interpret them. The expressions also communicate more than a reference to a date, for instance, differentially placing emphasis on the event of speaking, the speaker, and the event used for reckoning.

Even the most portable of the expressions signifies more than a temporal referent: Metadata is a semiotic technology for entextualizing, contextualizing, and recontextualizing data and documents, enabling them to shed their contextual ties so they can travel far and wide. See Almklov for a case study of the decontextualization and recontextualization of data among geologists and engineers in subsurface oil exploration. See Espeland and Stevens for a sociological analysis of commensuration—the comparison of different entities with a common metric—as a general social process.

Although the term is of recent coinage, emerging out of the database and statistics community, as a principle of information organization it has been in use for considerably longer, for instance as an approach to bibliographic control in library science Burnett, Ng, and Park ; Greenberg The term came to prominence in library and information science as librarians struggled to adapt their traditional approaches to cataloging for the new and unruly information space of the World Wide Web.

With the expansion of networked computing and the emergence of the Internet as the central system for information searching and dissemination, metadata standards were seen as a crucial component of information infrastructure Weibel Although a few scholars wish to distinguish cataloging from metadata creation e.

The review of metadata definitions and typologies of metadata functions offered below is not comprehensive, but seeks to highlight important or common aspects among the work of library and information scientists. These are aspects for which a semiotic definition of metadata will need to account. The review begins with D. Metadata as Signification D. The problem Campbell seeks to address with his framework, similar to many of the other scholars discussed below, is an issue of classification: Metadata as a tool of information organization developed out of a number of different communities including librarians, computer scientists, text encoders, and database designers, and it is created and used not only in its traditional institutions, such as in libraries by formally trained professionals, but by a host of others in non-traditional information spaces pursuing divergent objectives.

Out of all these communities, institutions, and evolving practices, how can a few general classes of metadata activity be isolated and identified? Campbell starts by selecting two functional metadata classes, arguing that they are central if not exhaustive functions of all metadata: He then enumerates a few attributes common among the different metadata traditions.

First, metadata is data about data, or data that represents data for a specified purpose. Third, metadata is used in information spaces that are too large to be navigated effectively by individuals without the aid of information systems: Their proposed definition of metadata also seeks to encompass the two source traditions they identify, bibliographic control and data management. Burnett, Ng, and Park see two types of characterizations, which map onto the two functions: Structuralist theory, therefore, which examines linguistic systems as self-enclosed and self-referential structures of meaning, should have some light to shed on the practices of metadata, both in its traditional garb of bibliographic description and its newer manifestations as Dublin Core headers, TEI headers, Encoded Archival Descriptions EADs , geospatial information, and the like.

Campbell , 63 Campbell details a number of central concepts from structuralist theory including the distinction between synchronic and diachronic approaches to language, metaphor and metonymy as modes of signification, and literary displacement. Roman Jakobson proposed the distinction between metaphor and metonymy in his seminal study of poetics.

Metonymy, on the other hand, is a relationship of contiguity or association between entities. Whereas Jakobson uses Russian verse to illustrate these relationships, Campbell uses metadata. For instance, the MARC codes of a bibliographic record are the tenor that connects to the descriptive identities of the vehicle, the fields, for records to be readable. The relationship between a resource and its metadata, say an article and its abstract, is metonymic: Metadata that takes one part to stand for the whole, such as a surrogate record for a book during search, is a specific type of metonym called a synecdoche.

Displacement is an extension of the distinction between metaphor and metonymy, elaborated by Northrop Frye Displacement is the movement away from myth, where mythical structures are increasingly submerged as realist genre conventions come to the fore. Romance was one step along the way, with its metonymic conventions of mythical structure: These levels of increasing displacement can be identified, Campbell argues, in different types of metadata. At one level of displacement is surrogate metadata such as bibliographic records, TEI headers, or other metadata that stand in place of the resource they describe.

Ontologies that understand themselves as mapping the entities and relations that make up reality could be considered the furthest reach of displacement from myth table 2. Displacement in Cataloging and Metadata. Adapted from Campbell , 67 table 1. The figurative devices described by Campbell leads to his recognition of a spectrum of metadata generation activities that consist of various mixtures of metaphor and metonymy.

A bibliographic record stands in a metonymic relations to its resource, a surrogate that represents and stands in for its object during the process of discovery. The standardized structure of the record, however, is metaphoric with its MARC field delimiters, coding, and controlled vocabularies for descriptions. A Dublin Core metadata header stands in a metonymic relation to its web page, whether as a harvested record in a metadata repository or as a synecdoche standing in for the whole.

The library and information science definitions and typologies of functions reviewed below focus on aspects of resource description and use, and relatedly, on the intrinsic and extrinsic characterizations that support discovery and use. His framework places its emphasis on the types of relations between metadata and objects, or signifiers and signifieds.

This method of unearthing signifying relations is a crucial step, but also limited by its semiological assumptions of the constitutive division between sign and things. A semiotic analysis of metadata shifts the focus from arbitrary relations between signifiers and signifieds to the creation of appropriate and effective projections through thirds. The triadic model of semiosis opens signification to the pragmatic and normative relations.

Definitions of Metadata A number of scholars have attempted to identify and classify common aspects of metadata schemes across domains and institutions. Burnett, Ng, and Park provide a definition that seeks to incorporate what they identify as the two primary metadata traditions, bibliographic control and data management: This definition has two important differences from that of Burnett, Ng, and Park. First, it emphasizes the functional relationship of metadata to data as opposed to relationships of characterization. This definition of the object makes it possible to generalize metadata as a process that occurs in numerous situations and contexts, including those not usually addressed by library and information science.

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First, a second temporal aspect is considered alongside the purposeful orientation toward the future use of metadata: Second, metadata is specified as existing at a different level of abstraction than the object, a level considered higher or more abstract. Greenberg provides a number of definitions across her body of work and describes important aspects of metadata that do not clearly point toward one overarching definition. Studies defining metadata usually also offer typologies of metadata.

Burnett, Ng, and Park propose a simple dichotomy between two types of metadata, which closely maps to their two types of characterization: The early stages of the development of the Dublin Core metadata scheme followed this division. The initial workshop in Dublin, Ohio, resulted in a set of descriptive metadata elements that adhered to, among others, the principle of intrinsicality Weibel These types of elements were seen as necessary to enable the scheme to accommodate user communities needing to administer, archive, and control access to data and other information objects Lagoze The seven types of metadata identified by the developers of the Dublin Core, usually consolidated into lists of three to five types, makes up the constituents of typologies in later scholarship.

For instance, the National Information Standards Organization NISO identifies three main types metadata— descriptive, structural, and administrative—and list rights management and preservation as subtypes under administrative metadata. In contrast, Anne Gilliland settles on five types: Describing the foregoing definitions of metadata in a semiotic idiom not only provides new conceptual tools for description, but also introduces a shift in the understanding of what metadata is.

Analyzed as a third, what Greenberg points to as the designated object is a sign, the contextual data metadata is an interpretant, and a correspondence-preserving projection is the semiotic object figure 6. Metadata Generation as a Third. Projection Metadata Designated object What are the implications of this model? First, it fundamentally changes the understanding of the object of metadata by analytically splitting it between Peircean sign and semiotic object.

The importance of point- of-view, or the roles of those who engage with metadata, will be discussed below. The semiotic model of metadata use differs from that of metadata generation. During metadata use, the designated objected of metadata generation is no longer part of the picture: Users of metadata could be several different kinds of interpretants including the mind of an information- seeker, a librarian, an XML parser, or a DNS resolver.

Metadata Use as a Third. Projection User Metadata What kinds of correspondence-preserving projections do these different kinds of designated objects and metadata, as signs, create? At least three different types of semiotic objects can be distinguished: Intentional statuses, for instance, would need to be embodied in a perceivable medium and read within a particular semiotic frame for conceivables to become signs. They might also be described as the referent of a signifier, as understood by Saussure A stereotypical example of such a stereotypical object within library science would be a book.

The spatial location could be seen as a legisign if its shelf space was determined by a library classification, but the contingent location of the actual book is a sinisign. The book is, to this point, taken as a complex object made from a bundle of possible qualities figure 8.

Notice that other possible qualities, such as the color of the cover, paper weight, font, or width of margins, are not singled out of the bundle for inclusion in the bibliographic record. A number of the actors that brought the book into being are included among the metadata fields. The participant roles of speakers described by Erving Goffman help to characterize the attributions of responsibility and justify the inclusion of particular agents in a bibliographic record.

For example, when Barak Obama delivers a speech, he is recognized as the animator and principle, even though his speechwriters acted as authors. In our bibliographic record example, the author of the book is ascribed the role of principle and author, while an editor, compiler, or translator would be seen more as an author and less a principle. Publishers are part principle, part animator.

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Other animators, such as typesetters, printers, papermakers, and designers are not included in the bibliographic record, or rather they are folded into the corporate personhood of the publisher. Objectification by Participant Activity. Interpretant 3 Publisher, Random House Object Interpretant 2 Objectification by Author, Jane Smith participant activity Interpretant 1 Translator, Bob Jones Sign Book The inclusion of particular actors with specific forms of responsible for bringing about the designated object points to an important aspect of correspondence-preserving projections: Irrespective of any text-internal cohesion, the inclusion of principles, authors, and animators in a bibliographic record works to cohere and identify a portion of social life, and then to objectify the result figure Interpretant 3 Abstract, Dog chases cat Object Interpretant 2 Objectification of text Subject, Cats, Dogs Interpretant 1 Index, Tabbies, 2—6, 15 Sign Book While Hanks is concerned with the combination of sign complex and cultural context that cohere texts, Silverstein and Urban are more interested in the process by which parts of discourse are segmented and extracted from ongoing social life and later re-inserted in new contexts: The contribution of metadata generators to the cultural order, in the example of bibliographic records, is meta-textual Hanks , While the document—text distinction is untenable, works could be approached as embodied signs, with the documents collocated by catalogers standing in for the body of the author.

Notice that what Smiraglia calls documents and works are what Hanks would call texts and textuality, and what Silverstein and Urban would call text-artifacts and texts. Of greater interest in most of the literature is not the question of what metadata is, but what metadata is meant to do. Karen Coyle , for instance, states: As metadata began to proliferate in the closing years of the twentieth-century, library and information science scholars sought to identify and classify metadata elements.

The principle on which these typologies came to rely was function. Some scholars, such as Sherry Vellucci , include functionality within their definitions of metadata: Metadata are data that describe the attributes of a resource; characterize its relationships; [and] support its discovery, management, and effective use. Before stating her definition, Vellucci argues against those librarians who felt that metadata generation in library settings should be considered a type of cataloging.

Against this view, she expresses the benefits of adopting terminology used in a wider array of professional communities.

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It is unclear why Vellucci decided to include the last aspect in her definition. The metadata types identified at the Warwick conference Lagoze should therefore be understood as deriving from the functions the conference participants wanted the Dublin Core to support in addition to resource discovery table 3. Dublin Core Metadata Functions and Types. Table adapted from Greenberg , 21 table 1. IFLA , 7—9 ; Howarth , It also brings to the fore a number of common characteristics or behaviors of metadata.

For instance, both typologies seek to support the collection of information that characterizes not just the designated object, but also the metadata itself. Enabling metadata to document itself by including elements for its creators, or dates of creation and modification, is seen as an essential function.

The potential of nested levels, data to metadata to meta-metadata and so on, and the arbitrariness of the levels from one instance to the next, hints at the possible opening out of metadata beyond the immediate horizon of a particular scheme. Like Greenberg, he focuses on the functions metadata are designed to perform, although for Mayernik these functions are more tightly bound to specific situations.

He is interested in the social and institutional contexts in which metadata is created to pursue specific work practices or tasks within the sciences. This type of critique would see the ad-hoc metadata practices of many scientists as betraying what Beall understands as the primary function of metadata: Metadata is not found in nature.

It is entirely an invention; it is an artificiality. Metadata is constructed for some purpose, some activity, to solve some problem. The point of metadata is to be useful in some way. This means that it is important that one can act on the metadata in a way that satisfies some needs. If an instrument can be defined as an artificed entity whose object is a function Kockelman b , then by extension, metadata might be defined as an artifact whose object is to fulfill a resource-related function.

His analysis is aimed at carefully distinguishing the different constituent types of semiosis that work together to constitute a wielded instrument. Importantly, Kockelman understands the process of wielding instruments as one of a number of general, non-propositional semiotic processes, including heeding affordances, undertaking actions, performing roles, and filling identities.

What might this semiotic model of metadata as an instrument look like? In the first third, the metadata field sign stands for the function of restriction object , which is realized by an action interpretant. The function of the use-restrictions can only be achieved through the prompting of an action, a second type of non-propositional semiotic process, whose object is a purpose. Kockelman b calls this second linked semiotic process a realizing embedded interpretant: In our example, the action of withholding A realizes the instrumental function of the resource-use metadata B.

The interpretant of the first third is the sign in the second: Metadata as Instrument Realized by an Action Resource-use example. The felicity of this particular utterance depends on already-established norms of librarian—patron interaction: For this particular interaction to be appropriate in context it must be recognized as a token of a type of interaction, and to be effective on context it must set up subsequent interactions as tokens of this type.

It has also taken the first steps of articulating a unified analytic framework for approaching metadata as signification that establishes common ground, adapting semiotic anthropology for this purpose. Several examples of the kind of analysis made possible by this framework were used as demonstrations, although they stop far short of their full potential. In particular, the examples analyze relatively more pragmatic and less semantic aspects of metadata. The analysis of the objectification of text, for instance, highlights the part metadata plays in stabilizing the identity of a text as an object.

It does not tackle the thornier issues of representation, what Campbell centrally confronts with his analysis of metonymy.

Kockelman a has sought to address the relationship of representational and non-representational semiotic processes and their interactions, and this is the direction in which a semiotic-functional analysis of metadata must proceed in the future. If the initial gesture of making an analogical connection between disciplines was bold, the difficulties of transforming analogy into a working analysis encourages a timid conclusion.

This thesis hopefully validates the potential of a semiotic anthropological approach to central issues in information organization and data mobility. It might also serve to direct anthropological attention to a phenomenon of increasing importance in the contemporary world. Language and Social Relations. Akrich, Madeleine, and Bruno Latour. Studies in Sociotechnical Change, edited by Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, — Available from ACLS website: Messerschmitt, Paul Messina, Jeremiah P.

Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through Cyberinfrastructure: Available from NSF website: How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed. Bauman, Richard, and Charles L. Bergman, Manfred Max, and Thomas S. Research, Archiving, and Reuse. Qualitative Social Research 6, no.

Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis. University of Pennsylvania Press. Thinking about the Digital Humanities. Language and Representation in Information Retrieval. Blok, Anders, and Torben Elgaard Jensen. Hybrid Thoughts in a Hybrid World. Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet.

Wallis, and Noel Enyedy. Memory Practices in the Sciences. Ways of Knowing in a Networked Environment. Classification and Its Consequences. Why Information Is Not Enough. University of Toronto Press. Library Ideas 1, no. University of Chicago Press. Evidence from a National Survey. Carlson, Samuelle, and Ben Anderson. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Suggestions for a Sociology of Data Mobility. Dreyfus, Herbert, and Paul Rabinow.

Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. An Agenda for Infrastructure Studies. Bowker, and Cory P. Dynamics, Tensions, and Design. Bowker, and Christine L. Data, Metadata, and Collaboration. The Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church. University of California Press. Espland, Wendy Nelson, and Mitchell L. Writing from the Virtual Archive. From Science Studies to Documentation. Translated by Garret Barden and John Cumming. Gerson, Elihu, and Susan Leigh Star.

The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Available at Getty website: A Transformed Scientific Method. Douglas Caulkins and Ann T. Language and Communicative Practice. Electronic Library and Information Systems 30, no. A Guide for the Perplexed. Soul-Mates or Two Solitudes? Hughes, Trevor Pinch, 51— Available from IFLA website: Language and Political Economy.

On Language, edited by L. In Selected Writings, vol. Reflections on a Genealogy. Power and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society. The Manufacture of Knowledge: Agent, Person, Subject, Self: A Theory of Ontology, Interaction, and Infrastructure. Cybernetics, Semiotics, and Alternative Theories of Information. Affordances, Instruments, Actions, Roles, and Identities. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Retrieved March 15, , http: The Pasteurization of France. Translated by Alan Sheridan and John Law. Thinking with Eyes and Hands.

Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6: Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. Language, Metalanguage, and the Semiotics of Subjectivity. The Semiotic Turn and A. The Cultural Production of Scientific Disciplines. Mills, Gabrielle Durepos, and Elden Wiebe, 2—4.

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Reported Speech and Metapragmatics, edited by John A. Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science: An Analysis of the Subject Indexing Process. The Semiotics of Drink and Drinking. Linguistic and Semiotic Studies of Sociocultural Order. University of Minnesota Press. Metadata Realities for Cyberinfrastructure: The list is updated monthly and is searchable by title, actor, director or ratings for the entire period from to present.

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