justmetadatathings-blog

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“Practical Taxonomy Creation” is a 3-part ASI Online Learning course, taught by Heather Hedden.

This is a terrific offering for indexers wanting to expand their skill set and create a wider vista for work. Where are taxonomies and controlled vocabularies needed? Periodical and database indexing and large, multi-volume back-of-the-book indexing projects use controlled vocabularies. The need for taxonomies is especially growing in publishing, in marketing, in large corporate or government document or content management systems, image and multimedia collections, all kinds of websites, e-commerce, user experience (UX) design, and to support the software development process.

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Information on where to recruit taxonomists, whether freelance, contract, consultant, temporary, or full-time.

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American researchers say they were shocked by how much information they were able to unearth about people by simply looking at the phone numbers they called.

The Stanford University study encouraged volunteers to install a tracking application called MetaPhone onto their phones.

Researchers collected information for several months, and say they were able to predict people’s medical conditions, hobbies and relationships by only looking at the metadata.

Graduate student Jonathan Mayer, who led the study, says the results show a significant amount of personal information can be discovered through metadata.

"One of the things which is most concerning about the privacy properties we’ve uncovered is how easy it is to make inferences about the metadata on a large scale," he said.

"We had a participant who… had calls with a lumber yard and a locksmith and a hydroponics dealer and a bong shop.

"[You] don’t need a PHD in computer science to have some sense of what could be going on there."

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p.s. To any non-librarian readers: Libraries complete destroy your check-out records on purpose so that the government can’t ask us for it. Just FYI.

Reasonable Expectation of Privacy, the NSA, and the value of metadata | Pegasus Librarian

This last line isn’t directed at librarians, but it is a key fact. But the idea that metadata isn’t private, and as such libraries should get better metadata from publishers is interesting (and should be given a try).

(via chrischelberg)

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On Thursday morning, the Australian Government secured a back room deal with the Opposition to help push through highly controversial data retention laws.

In the negotiations, the Labor Opposition fought for the proposed laws to include a “Public Interest Advocate,” who can argue...

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Making the Most of Controlled Vocabularies

The following the second of a series of short essays written for a class on Information Architecture during the winter of 2013.

A controlled vocabulary, as defined by Morville and Rosenfeld in Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, refers to “any defined subset of natural language” (Morville Rosenfeld, 194). In the context of information architecture, this term refers to an ability to organize information for access and retrieval through the use of language and specific terms as they relate to one another. At a simple level, controlled vocabulary refers to both a group of equivalent terms, i.e. synonyms, and a group of preferred terminology, similar to industry jargon. At this level one can see how words or phrases used may have multiple meanings depending on their context. There are also more complicated structures of controlled libraries such as classification schemes—which define terminology based on a categorical hierarchy—as well as thesauri, which show how terms and concepts are related and occasionally interchangeable. Here it is important to note that terms do not exist in a vacuum, and certain words are inherently related to others and can be grouped together. As such, any industry or field that uses specialized terms to communicate can be said to rely on a controlled vocabulary (Wodtke).

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So, there you have it. From a table of membership in different groups we have gotten a picture of a kind of social network between individuals, a sense of the degree of connection between organizations, and some strong hints of who the key players are in this world. And all this—all of it!—from the merest sliver of metadata about a single modality of relationship between people. I do not wish to overstep the remit of my memorandum but I must ask you to imagine what might be possible if we were but able to collect information on very many more people, and also synthesize information from different kinds of ties between people! For the simple methods I have described are quite generalizable in these ways, and their capability only becomes more apparent as the size and scope of the information they are given increases. We would not need to know what was being whispered between individuals, only that they were connected in various ways. The analytical engine would do the rest! I daresay the shape of the real structure of social relations would emerge from our calculations gradually, first in outline only, but eventually with ever-increasing clarity and, at last, in beautiful detail—like a great, silent ship coming out of the gray New England fog.

Using Metadata to find Paul Revere - Kieran Healy (via infoneer-pulse)

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I Gotta Represent

When a librarian relentlessly trolls her Tumblr tags, keeping them tidy and clean.

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If It's Not In Our Archives, Master Jedi, It Simply Doesn't Exist

When a librarian-archivist is told by a professor that he thinks archives are outdated, pre-digital ideas that will be outsourced to Google within ten years, and she begins writing her battle plan to scrub all traces of him from the institutional archival memory.

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Welcome to 2002, bitches.

When a librarian notices that suddenly everyone — EVERYONE — is pushing back against intrusive data queries and spying, and she reaches beneath the desk to retrieve her FBI signs from a decade ago: http://www.librarian.net/technicality.html (via whenalibrarian)

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They'll Remember My Name

When a librarian sees that the official college Flickr account allows tagging by all authorized users, and she sets aside three hours of her workday.

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[Weep over the metadata clusterfuck of #hashtags on Tumblr and Twitter]

"Folksonomy" barely covers the half of it.

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[The most shocking result of the NSA spying reports:

"Metadata" is entering common vocabulary.]