Much of contemporary metadata scholarship focuses on the ethics of descriptive metadata, particularly classification systems. Rightly so. However, like Susan Sontag argues in her essay “Against Interpretation,” I think the focus on ethics and its effects on end users has become more important than the metadata and the labor of the library worker. Instead of purely focusing on ethics, we if we focused on aesthetics. What insights will the open up about the nature of metadata work?
In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art. 1
- I, for one, hate working with Dublin Core. There are some legitimate reasons for this, but my main dislike is how boring it looks and how uncomplicated it is. That’s it. It isn’t stimulating enough for me. It isn’t fun to work with, visually or intellectually. See 5a The aesthetics of information affects our relationships to it for further discussion on visual/spacial aspects of information.
[[Against Interpretation]] by [[Susan Sontag]] ↩︎