You can find the research blog of our ethnographic case study here:
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/metagold/.This website is still under construction. Look around, if you can take up with the design (yes, we know...). In the text below you can find lots of links that lead you to more information about the project.
Metadata rules the web. Are we witnessing the birth of a new regime of attention? What are its new chances, constraints and power relations? How can we describe a landscape of automated transtextuality? Does this provide us with new forms of presence and emergence? This academic research project will address such questions: On the one hand via theories that come out of cultural studies, media theory and philosophy; on the other hand through ethnographic research, interviews and experimental software.
We organise our project in five streams of enquiry. The first stream
looks into processes of decrease and increase of control and redistribution of power. Our second enquiry
looks at processes of metadata becoming content, and content becoming metadata. In the third stream
of enquiry we are interested in new forms of tagging. The fourth enquiry looks into the relationship of metadata and time, especially around the concepts of emergence and presence. Our last enquiry
is about metadata topology and the relationship of metadata to the topology of the digital space of the Internet. The five streams of enquiry are all directly related to each other.
Our empirical approach is also organised in five streams. In London and South England we conduct a loose form of ethnography over the period of 16 months. Here we look at four research networks that are situated at different point of time in the process of the creation and implementation of “ontologies”. In Shanghai and in Tokyo we engage in more intensive ethnography
(each 4-6 weeks long). Here we are especially interested in two video sharing platforms: Nico Nico Douga and Todou. Our third method is an experiment: We will upload a set of video files to several video platforms and harvest after 6 months the metadata they generate. The fourth method stream is an application: a new system of metadata generation and management for video material of long academic talks. Finally, we conduct expert interviews in Seoul, Shanghai, Tokyo and the UK.
We are well aware that this is a very ambitious plan. We will be lucky and happy, if we achieve a significant chunk of what we aim for.