Second enquiry: Metadata and content
Our second enquiry looks at the relationship of metadata and content. Traditionally, this relationship was rather clearly defined: As data about data, metadata is data about content. However, increasingly metadata becomes content itself. To take an example that is already very familiar to all of us: On video platforms such as Youtube, the representation of the number of users, who have formerly watched a video (e.g.: ‘ Views: 604.233’), becomes part of the user experience. The Japanese video-sharing platform Nico Nico Douga takes this further. It enables the users to write directly onto the moving image. The comments of the users merge with the video itself, as every following user sees the comments of former users directly on the clip, moving in and out of the frame of the moving image (more about this under 4.1.).
We believe that such forms of metadata-as-content are at the forefront of a larger shift in the role of metadata (Weinberger 2004). Social networking sites, for example, often turn data about users automatically into metadata. Again, we can observe here a blurring of the boundaries of data and metadata. In advanced versions of the semantic web each website provides well-structured and machine-understandable metadata about other websites linked or otherwise connected to it – and vice versa. Whilst this in itself is nothing new – in a way links have always created a form of metadata about websites -, it gains a new momentum when computers have access to each website’s metadata: Now the metadata of website A becomes part of the description of website B and vice versa.
To understand this process of metadata becoming content, and content becoming metadata, we plan to engage with Gerard Genette‘s theory of ‘literature on the second level’ (1982). Genette‘s theory was written to understand trans- and paratextuality in literature. We ask, what happens, if such transtextuality takes the form of metadata, and therefore evolves to a new level through the computation of collective input.