aesthetics of information

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?...

🌱 seedling I first started thinking about the relationship between spirituality and information when Kyle Courtney, the copyright librarian at Harvard, told me about an interaction he had with a Buddhist monk. Some monks were collaborating with Harvard to give texts to the library, I think. These texts go back to the Middle Ages, so of course they’re in the public domain, ready to be digitized. Until one Monk said, “I wrote this one....

Interacting with information in any capacity triggers sensual responses and resonances in our bodies and minds (which are also our bodies). Metadata workers describe and organize knowledge and information. This requires tuning in to those pleasurable or otherwise sensual reactions as organizing principles. I’ve come to think of the body as a computer, taking in more data from more sources than we could ever consciously consider. Our emotions are a vast subterranean intelligence, drawing on not only our senses, but the genetic memories of our ancestors and endless layers of communal thought....