M E T A D A T A is data, about data.
March 28, 2014
Continuing our pursuit of the unknown, we dive deep into the digital history of the soldiers of the Civil War. And in order to make the research easier, we, like many previous online historians will provide searchable key words and information to link our findings to the researchers of the future. This is called METADATA. METADATA is also the trail of information left behind after any digital transaction, for example when you send an email, a LOOOOOONG trail of information is left behind….
- sender’s name, email and IP address
- recipient’s name and email address
- server transfer information
- date, time and timezone
- unique identifier of email and related emails
- content type and encoding
- mail client login records with IP address
- mail client header formats
- priority and categories
- subject of email
- status of the email
- read receipt request
Or when you use your camera-phone…..
- photographer identification
- creation and modification date and time
- location where photo was taken
- details about a photo’s contents
- copyright information
(These examples provided by The Guardian)
For our purposes, we will enter METADATA information about our soldiers so that future researchers can find what we have digitized and compiled.
I entered a few more documents into my OMEKA project site. I thought it important to add George Karn’s original volunteer enlistment form but Google was unable to OCR anything more from the document than “VOLUNTEER ENLISTMENT,” so I transposed the entire document myself. It took a while but I think it was worth the time.
As far as what the NSA is doing with our METADATA, I think it’s wasted energy to complain about it. We live in an age where privacy is no longer an assured privilege to each member of society. Some people have less privacy than others and some people have nearly none at all, some by choice, some by profession. To tell the government they are not allowed to collect data of any kind on it’s citizens or on citizens of other countries is a futile effort in my opinion. The government will do it one way or another, and if they don’t they will be at a great disadvantage to those entities that do. And a LOT has happened since this article was written in July of 2013.