Metadata is crucial for the digital humanities in several respects, from initially classifying and organizing raw sources to later discovery and analysis by researchers. Put simply, metadata is a common core of descriptive categories that archivists apply to incoming records to facilitate not only their own internal organization of those records, but more importantly to enable easier discovery by subsequent users of an archive. (Greer and Neatrour, 2015) The importance of metadata to an analog database is easy enough to understand, given the infeasibility of manually searching through an often overwhelming amount of physical records; analog metadata discovery tools like card catalogs have long facilitated more efficient discovery of useful sources.

For digital humanists, however, metadata assumes an even greater importance given the central importance of electronic search tools within the field. A relatively small number of digital archival records are fully transcribed and thus discoverable via simple keyword search, particularly when dealing with older records that may be handwritten and thus difficult to digitize via text-scanning processes like Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Furthermore, non-text resources like posters, photographs, artwork, and digital renderings of physical objects are intrinsically incapable of being discovered via any text-based search that is limited to those sources’ own innate properties. Finally, digital databases also tend to be overwhelmingly large, and thus even less amenable to manual browsing than an analog archive. The ability to conduct searches through metadata thus becomes crucial to digital researchers. “Advanced Search” features on digital archives are often targeted toward specific metadata fields, allowing researchers to search (for example) for particular subjects, date ranges, and locations featured in particular records. Comprehensive application of metadata to archival materials, and consistent application of terminology within that metadata (e.g. Library of Congress Authorities for subject headings), makes such searches possible. (Vogelsang, 2024; Greer and Neatrour, 2015)

Of course, digital humanists should also bear the inherent limitations of metadata in mind. Metadata is input by individuals with their own limitations and biases, particularly when processing the records of socioeconomic groups to which they do not belong; it at all possible, it is ideal to involve donors or affected groups in the process of creating the metadata for their records, so that accurate, appropriate and respectful terminology and information is used. (Carbajal and Caswell, 2021) And since the process of applying metadata to a record is inherently subjective, variations in how one archivist versus another will describe certain records will inevitably occur, though appropriate training and best practices can at least keep these variations within a still-useable range. (Greer and Neatrour, 2015)

Tools like Tropy and Omeka can help digital humanities practitioners work with metadata. Tropy is used for initially applying metadata to primary records, including analog records that a practitioner may be digitizing themselves (e.g. photographs of documents taken in-person at a physical archive). Tropy comes with standard metadata fields already built-in to its software (e.g. Dublin Core), though these can be customized to the needs of individual resources. It also allows for the bulk application of similar metadata to a group of records, greatly speeding up the sometimes time-consuming process of applying metadata to individual records. The web-frontend software Omeka also allows for users to write metadata into the records that users upload, but one of its strongest features is its interoperability with Tropy. Records encoded with metadata on Tropy can be directly uploaded to Omeka with the metadata intact, and these in turn can be displayed publicly on Omeka with whatever fields the practitioner chooses made public.

Bibliography

Carbajal, Itza, and Michelle Caswell. “Critical Digital Archives: A Review from Archival Studies.” American Historical Review 126, 3 (2021): 1102-1120.

Martin, Greer and Anna Neatrour. “Using Metadata to Describe Digital Content.” Public Library Partnership Program, Digital Public Library of America, 2015.

Vogelsang, Henning von. “Categories Or Tagging? Differences In Taxonomy And IA.” Bootcamp, November 22, 2024. https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/categories-or-tagging-differences-in-taxonomy-and-ia-b9944ee73da8