Digital Watts – Digital Scholarship @ LMU

Week 6: Reflection

I was initially very anxious about metadata and the issue of representing material digitally in away that is very conscious of the goal of the SCL. In so my approach to each object was somewhat slow and cautious, but a method that I honestly believed served me well. I began by reading the object for the most relevant content and attempting to understand the purpose and message of said object. After that I began filling the basic tabs of title, creator, date and type. Once those were finished I would brainstorm both subject terms and a description which I would edit after a second rereading of the item. In so the decisions I was making were ones I now feel comfortable with as there was also a continuous return to the vocabulary terms we generated as a group. If I had to estimate a time frame for each object I would say it was anywhere from 30-45 minutes. There were definitely a couple of materials that I was a bit apprehensive about and reviewed multiple times in an attempt to ensure that I had done the information it contained justice. I attempted to stays as accurate and close to the text as I could, but overall I reviewed the materials all on separate occasions and as a class made alterations based on the consensus on the vocabulary. The items without a title were simply given a brief description regarding type, prevailing topic and creator. I personally found each and everyone of the readings to be helpful as many of them placed Watts in the necessary context that would permit us to approach this project with a certain degree of awareness. In addition to those I found the articles discussing Digital Humanities and counter histories very impactful as well as the combination ultimately spoke to the project we are attempting to lay foundations for.

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

Fire This Time by Gerald Horne

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Venus in Two Acts” by Saidiya Hartman

Digital Humanities Chapter 1 Anne Burdick

Tagging is a way in which to further group and or describe the content of an object and I believe it would be beneficial if it was implemented as a way in which to add commentary. As the objects themselves are telling only of the content within them the library could utilize tags to propel their social justice goals by including tags that speak directly to their community and to the strides they are attempting to make. Adding commentary via tags would leave the object largely as it is while simultaneously allowing for the SCL to connect said object to the present or revisit the past and correct/comment on whatever narrative was/is being perpetuated. By using tags the commentary could even be a sort of disclaimer that leads viewers, who may not have the entire story of Watts, to a more open minded and socially/racially conscious mentality.

Week 6: Metadata Creation and the Overall Process

1. I found the metadata creation portion of this project to be a mostly straightforward task that did not take up too much time. When approaching an item, I put in a title of the largest print phrase at the top of the item. Sometimes this was a clear headline, like for a newspaper article (“How Hot is Watts?), but at times that was just the letterhead of the group publishing or sharing the item (“Committee for the Defense of Philip Bentley Brooks”). In writing a description for an item, I tried to summarize the overall purpose and message and mention as many individual subtopics that were listed as possible. With regards to subject terms, two parts of that process were helpful and necessary in generating consistent subject terms across all of our work. We brainstormed different subject terms on a shared spreadsheet and then reviewed them. Then, after filling out descriptions and titles and applying subject terms to items in our individual excel sheets (which served as rough drafts before we uploaded our metadata to Omeka), we reviewed the items we labeled and edited them together. This was really helpful in establishing a uniform methodology with different items. Generating and accurately, concisely applying subject terms was the most difficult part of this process, but the method of group editing made them much more clear and focused.
As for the readings in the class, I found the excerpt from Tagging: People-powered Metadata for the Social Web to be excellent context for the immediate actions of the metadata creation process. The articles from Saidiya Hartman and Safiya Coleman were extremely helpful for establishing the importance of archives and especially digital archives in the face of the silencing of counternarratives in the age of Google and throughout history. Gerald Horne’s The Fire This Time was immensely important for understanding the context and details of Watts 1965. James Baldwin and Ta-nehisi Coates’s works, the most impactful works in the course for me, were important for placing the Digital Watts project within the black community in America’s larger struggles for authentic representation and self-identity within an Anglocentric mainstream culture. For me, this last piece helped bring perspective to the ultimate goal of shifting public perceptions about Watts and other black communities in some minute way.

2. Tagging is a process by which users can provide more information or feedback regarding a digital item which makes it searchable or connected to other digital items with a tag, much like a #hashtag on Twitter. Tags by public users most often provide descriptions of what the item is about or what it relates to (events, places, topics, etc.). The benefits of this system are that it provides users the power and freedom to mark, label, and connect items within the archive, much like retweeting, reposting, or commenting on an item on Twitter or Facebook. This can create an engaged conversation among users about digital archive items and how they relate to our world today. The drawback of this functionality is that there are no established limits or methodology to guide users in how they tag items. Open tagging among users can sometimes lead to a glut of metadata that is less than useful, overly general, or misleading for other users. In reviewing other platforms with open-to-all-users tagging like Nines.org, an online database for nineteenth century scholarship, we noticed that tags were sometimes overly general (“England”) or cryptic (“cruikshank”), which could sometimes lead to cluttered design and confusion on the part of a user trying to navigate items on the site. In opening up the archive to tagging, the SCL can absolutely advance its mission of giving the community access to archival texts and a means to organize and analyze items, and make this archive more relevant to their own experience. The SCL should just weigh the exciting possibilities for further engagement with the community against the ways in which open source programming design like this can make for a messier interface for users. Of course, as with any kind of community engagement, the messiness is often an essential part of the process when facilitating authentic communications amongst a large group of people.
One system we read about that I think could work for the SCL’s digital archive is the combination of these user-generated tags and administrator-generated controlled vocabularies. The subject headings we developed through group brainstorming and peer review (which in this case can be considered a “controlled vocabulary” because they were vetted by a group) can stand alone as ways to guide content (examples include: ‘Los Angeles Police Department” and “Community Engagement”), but users can also add their own tags, which offers a way for them to organize and structure content on the website that makes the most sense to them. This way, users of the site can navigate items via subject headings developed by staff or volunteers in a controlled environment, a generally more tidy, clear system, or tags created by users, which can be more representative of the vernacular or interests of a larger set of public users.

Week 6: Creating Metadata and Selecting Tagging Systems

With the goals of the Southern California Library in mind, the metadata process was largely based on accessibility. The question which underpinned the choices when it came to metadata like subject terms and description was: How can I make this “findable” for both researchers and community members?

1.) Because most of the objects I dealt with clearly provided information like the title, creator, contributor and date(s), there was little trace of my hand in these matters. However, for metadata like, the subject terms and description, I felt a great responsibility to accurately represent the object and to provide comprehensive information not covered by the title, creator, contributor and dates. For this reason, I employed a method in which I first identified and listed the title, author(s), and the date of an object before moving forward. If I ran into any problems with these fields I left them blank to be discussed at a later time with the class. After I located the initial metadata, I began collecting information for the description. To go about this with shorter documents, I read them in their entirety then identified the function, purpose, or goal of the document and any predominant themes. In the case of periodicals, article titles were particularly helpful for gauging the scope of the material. In order to craft a description for the more lengthly documents, I depended on the table of contents to identify some key topics and then craft a description. However, in the case of the McCone report I found the section titles like, “The Crisis – An Overview” and “144 Hours in August 1965,” cryptic and sensational so if I came upon an issue like this, I spent enough time in each section of the document to identify the main points and important themes. After the description was completed, I moved on to the subject terms. Using the information I gained in crafting the description I began by using very general terms like “housing” and “law enforcement” alongside more specific terms like “Rumford Fair Housing Act” and “Workers Union,” (this is something that would change after I workshopped my subject terms with the class). Most often, I chose subject terms directly from the vocabulary used in the material.
After I completed the input of the metadata on my own, we reviewed our choices as a class and identified changes that needed to be made, subject terms which functioned well (or did not function well), and addressed material with missing metadata or with metadata that we were unsure of. This last step of the process was particularly helpful; to see the choices others made with subject terms allowed us to work as a group to shape a cohesive vocabulary of search terms. Personally, the group workshopping helped me narrow down my subject terms into more specific and useful metadata. For instance, instead of including both general terms and specific vocabulary, I found that the more specific subject terms were much more useful and functioned to fill any gaps that were left by the other metadata fields. For this reason I feel confident that my choice of subject terms will make the objects available and findable for many audiences.

The most difficult part of the process was negotiating with my feelings of inadequacy. As a graduate student in English Literature I am inclined to research a text quite thoroughly before I make any claims about it. Therefore, it was difficult for me to create metadata for these objects when I did not feel like an expert in the field. While I read the material and spent a good amount of time with it, I still struggled with the fact that I am not a specialist when it comes to Watts, nor am I a librarian who is well-practiced in assigning metadata. However, many of our readings for the class were helpful in providing historical information about Watts as well as theoretical practices when it comes to approaching archives and digital space. For instance, Gerald Horne’s Fire Next Time provided necessary historical information about Watts 1965 and even named and contextualized some of the material we digitized (ie. the McCone Report) and newspaper clippings (ie. The LA Times article “1,000 Riot in LA) we came across in our research. Theoretically, the Ta-Nehisi Coates novel Between the World and Me was great for approaching and understanding the socio-political, racial, and colonial power struggles over the black body in America. While as a female I must guard and protect my body in ways a male will never know, Coates’ text made it palpable just how different my experience is from Coates’ and that of the Black American male. In this way, Coates’ text highlighted the problematic role I played in the digitizing of materials pertaining to a history that is not my own. However, while I do believe the constant interrogation of my role in this project is unquestionably necessary, I do not feel it was counter-productive and I am confident in saying that I did my best to serve the needs of the Southern California Library.

2.) According to Gene Smith in his book, Tagging: People Powered Metadata for the Social Web, tags are “keywords added by users” which “can be descriptions of the resources subject matter, its location, its intended use, a reminder, or something else entirely” (14). He goes on to say that “different people have different tagging patterns. . . Tagging systems allow for — and even encourage — these differences” (14). In other words, tagging is information about an object provided by the community. The benefits of tagging are numerous. For one, tagging allows for a collaborative understanding of an object which reaches many audiences. Second, as an information organization system, tagging allows an object, as Smith says, “to be in two, three, or more ‘places’ at once” (27). Thanks to tagging, a digital object is not bound to its standard metadata like Library of Congress subject terms. Instead, a digital object can be found by other, oftentimes more accessible, subject terms provided by the community. While a downfall of tagging is that its idiosyncratic nature is difficult to track, for the purposes of the Southern California Library, tagging is a great way to make information accessible to the community and to engage the community with the materials.
There are many different tagging systems; some websites have an ‘anything goes’ method when it comes to tagging while others have a more controlled system in which users may choose from preset tags. In order for the tagging system on this particular project to be successful, I would suggest a tagging system that falls somewhere in between. The most functional system might be one that mirrors the example of Etsy, which Gene Smith references in his article, “Tagging: Emerging Trends.” Etsy gives the user the option to chose from prescribed tags as well as the option to create his or her own tags: “Etsy’s pre-defined tags form the top-level category navigation on the website. The suggested tags are actually sub-categories for each of the main categories. While users are nudged toward these suggested tags, they can still enter their own tags” (16). With this method, Smith claims that Etsy can maintain a “fairly stable navigation system that remains responsive to the needs of users” (16). Simply offering the ability to tag is meaningless unless the tagging system actually works to make material more accessible and easier to find. Including suggested tags will eliminate the chaos of a pure user-based vocabulary, yet users will still have the option to provide their own tags which will fill any gaps left by the pre-defined tags. This way the material will be accessible through both the preset tags and the tags users develop, optimizing an objects circulation and find-ability. Implementing this kind of tagging system for the resources digitized for the Southern California Library would be best for serving the mission of the library: “to document and make accessible histories of struggles that challenge racism and other systems of oppression so we can all imagine and sustain possibilities for freedom” (emphasis added by me).

Week 6: A Process, Social-Tagging, and Some Final Thoughts

The process of generating metadata for these digital objects was one that I found especially challenging. It was not the actual labor of it so much as the sensitivity and precision I tried to bring to this process, which was tempered by the knowledge that this material was someone’s property. By property, I mean much more than simply having physical custody of the object: these documents are the sum total of a community’s history, a record of violence acted upon them, upon their bodies, and being asked to extrapolate from that history “subject terms” or “descriptions” was a process with which I struggled throughout this class. With that in mind, perhaps my process is not one that should necessarily be emulated — perhaps it was too cautious or mentally laborious to be of much use. However, I do think that offering a multitude of approaches to working with this material might potentially benefit the SCL or at the very least that is my hope in detailing my process here.

I began with the “easiest” objects first (though this is not to suggest any of the material was “simple” or “easy”). By this, I mean those documents that were shorter, had clearly identifiable titles, dates, creators, sources, etc., and in their content were focused on a single issue — though as I later discovered, that central “issue” was often bound up with so much more than the explicit content of the document itself. Beginning this way allowed me to ease myself into the process and build up a measure of confidence with the process before moving onto the more challenging documents. I filled in those fields that were contained explicitly in the material itself and did so for every object I was assigned. This meant revisiting my digital objects multiple times, which allowed me to “proof” my work as I went on. After I had exhausted all the information that was readily available from the document itself, I began to intuit those fields that were not as readily available, e.g. “description,” “subject,” “creator,” and “contributor.” Artifacts that did not have titles were prominent among by assigned objects: I negotiated with this fact by creating brief, informative titles that were as grounded in the text of the artifact as possible. My aim was to preserve the language of the material while remaining clear, concise, and descriptive. Subject terms were perhaps the most challenging field to address: remaining consistent across their application (both within my own objects and with my peer’s work); attempting negotiate between brevity and specificity; highlighting those aspects of the artifact that were truly significant while acknowledging that this would mean relegating some issues to the background. I think it would be helpful to have a single set of eyes review all the objects we digitized and look for consistency among the terms to provide a more unified, coherent descriptive language. This process was very labor intensive and often time-consuming. We spent at least a total of four hours of class time working on generating this material and I can personally attest to hours more spent outside of that to make sure that the work I had done in class was up to par.

I’m not entirely sure I ever felt as though I was “done” describing an object — implicit in this process is choosing to foreground some aspects of the artifact and rendering others invisible. A few sentences hardly seemed enough to encompass the disparate, intricate content of some of the objects I was assigned — how can a twenty page journal be summarized in two sentences? This was in my mind the most difficult part of generating metadata: not ever being satisfied, not ever being certain that I was “done” with an artifact. As I type this blog response, I am reviewing my eleven artifacts to ensure that there is a coherent language, style, and tone to my metadata and descriptors. Most helpful in this process was the collaborative nature of our work, the shared spreadsheets, the in-class work, and having a fresh set of eyes to review my metadata. In making this a communal experience, I felt as though I was able to encompass a range of voices and ideas in my metadata that wouldn’t have otherwise been possible. Also helpful were the readings that had been assigned throughout the semester. The ones I would most recommend were Coates’s Between the World and Me, The Fire This Time, and “Metadata for the Masses.” The first helped establish the stakes of the work we have been tasked with, the second helped contextualize the artifacts in light of Watts 1965, and the third helped me flesh out what exactly metadata “meant,” how it is structured, and how it can serve as an organizing principle for a disparate and eclectic grouping of material.

“Metadata for the Masses” — a section of Tagging: People-Powered Metadata for the Social Web — was invaluable in answering the questions posed in this prompt. Tags can serve as associative, descriptive, or organizational tools: they structure links between resources, aggregate and associate related content, they “label” digital artifacts — and it is a labelling process that has the potential to be part of a “bottom-up classification system” (82). In this way (as is the case of “folksonomies”), tags can establish “ informal relationships” between objects based on “usage patterns” rather than a tightly controlled or regimented set of language (82). The benefit of this is a shift in agency from the people to whom these objects “belong” (i.e. those people who have physical or digital ownership of them) to those who are merely “accessing” the material online. This shift in agency is one that I see as being in line with the SCL’s mission to cater not only to academics who use the archive for scholarly research but to the community itself. While this certainly can be construed as a beneficial consequence of allowing “social tagging,” there are naturally caveats that come with this shift in agency: it is never safe to assume that the people who can and would access this material (and thus contribute to the tagging system) are necessarily part of the community or sensitive to the issues endemic in these objects. The internet, as I’m sure everyone is aware, is populated by people who are prejudiced, racially insensitive (to put it mildly), or simply looking to disrupt productive conversations about race in America. I would then suggest a modified social-tagging system in which the language and tags “available” to the public are decided by the SCL but which tag is assigned to which object is left to the people who access the material online. Tagging has been an integral part of our own work on this material, specifically in terms of “descriptive,” “resource,” and “source,” but a tagging system with “opinion” and “play & performance” type tags would work well alongside the “tagging” that has already taken place (67). It would allow for further collaboration between the library, community, and its users as well as give voice to those people who have been implicitly excluded in this metadata-generating process.

Week 6: A Review and Response

1.)
The most challenging part of this course was the constant and necessary awareness of my impact upon the object, that my own understanding of them would provide that vision to those who would read my descriptions, subject terms, and who was decided upon as a source versus a contributor. With this awareness of my impact, I believe it made the job both easier and more difficult: the ease came from my assurance of being able to use the language of the objects themselves to describe them; the difficulty came with narrowing that language down to subject terms. And so in terms of my generating the metadata as quickly and succinctly as possible, here is my method:

Get the title, author and date from the objects from a first going over, this way you can attach a name to the object in your mind, and quickly move through multiple items at once, generating basic data.
If the author or date is not obtainable from an immediate glance, then it is time to start skimming the material, and keeping in mind what the object is saying about what it is, or what purpose it has to provide. This will then build into the description of the object.
If there are any clues in the piece as to a date or author, do a quick internet search. As an example, one of my objects was a letter from an organization to the public, but did not provide a date, so I looked up the organization to see that it was not established until the late 70s, providing a “circa” date, since the object was discussing the founding of the organization, meaning I could make the educated assumption that the object was from the first year(s) of the founding of this organization in the early 70s.

So, my method breaks down into a rapid gathering of “visible” data from an immediate once over of the object, then a more in depth, and possible fast research oriented approach to find more information for the metadata.

With my method in mind, my general time frame of working on objects was probably about 15 minutes per object, give or take five minutes depending on how much research (either by reading the object instead of just skimming, or doing internet research on an organization or date). Sometimes an object would not have an explicit title, such as a letter from Thomas Bradley to the community of South Los Angeles during his campaign. I decided upon a very formal approach of titling, with a much detail as could be taken from a first glance approach. So for the letter from Bradley, I saw there was a letterhead, that this was a formal correspondence stating this was a campaign letter from Thomas Bradley, specifically his running for city councilman. Then after reading the address, I knew it was to the public and not written to a specific person. And so I decided to name the piece “A Letter from the desk of Thomas Bradley’s Councilman Campaign.” I would then address all of the “missing” information from this title that I created (or any title provided to me by the object) in the description. So continuing with the Bradley letter, the letter was in regards to the corruption of the city councilmen on the council at the time, and how they were not in support of the Fair Housing or Fair Employment acts of Los Angeles. That is pertinent information that a researcher would need about the Acts, who supported them, and corruption in LA politics. With all of this then put in the description, it made it a bit easier to approach the subject terms. As for subject terms, I believe this was the most difficult to create. I had to split my thoughts into the researcher, someone who would have definitive search terms in regards to their approach, versus someone who would just be interested, and not have a particular approach who would find these objects fascinating simply on their own, but would need to see what the connections of the objects are. It helped greatly to have the “hive mind” approach where the class collaborated terms from both aspects, and then refined them to the proper and yet least intrusive terms to apply to the search of the piece.

Lastly, as for readings that were provided in the class, I had the best help from Gerald Horne’s introduction and first two chapters of his text “The Fire This Time” to provide a lot of missing context that these objects were being created in and after the events of 1965. Secondly, the introduction of “Sorting Things Out” for help in the metadata department.

2.) Tagging is, I would hope, a less complicated beast than Subject Terms, however it allows a lot more of a personal implication upon the object, meaning that you would be able to manipulate what the object is saying about itself. But at the same time it is then more searchable by everyone because a tag will create a network of the objects, a more and less scholastic environment (meaning scholars can interact with the tagging systems, but the non-scholar can more easily interact with the objects, with their own language). I would be in support of a library user tagging capability because it is in alignment with the goals of the community oriented archive, and it would provide the users with a more in depth experience of being able to have the objects speak for the archive.

As a suggested system of tagging, I would tag items as “Pre-Watts 1965” and “Post-Watts 1965” so that it would be easier to quickly gather objects that show the build up to the events, or reactions from the events, etc.

¶ Week 6: Questions

Please answers both questions below:

1.) The work you are doing on the Digital Watts Project is first and foremost for the Southern California Library. With that in mind, please explain your metadata creation process. In other words, give the library insight into what it takes to do what you did so they may learn from your efforts. Answer questions like: What order did you do things in? How did you decide on titles if the artifact did not already have one? What are your thoughts on the creation and application of subject terms? How much time did it take? How do you know you are done describing an object? What was the most difficult part of the process? Also, please make sure to share which of the class readings where most helpful—be they readings about classification, readings about Watts, etc.—and explain why they were helpful.

2.) The Southern California Library has expressed an interest in allowing library users to tag their digitized objects in order to add more information to them and/ or to described the objects in ways that speak more to their specific perspective or community. Talk about tagging: What is it? What are the benefits? What are the concerns and pitfalls? How does tagging connect with the library’s mission? What is the difference between tagging and the work you have already done? As part of your answer you must suggest at least one possible tagging system they could employ.

Week #5: Classification and Ethics

We are making the ethical choices of describing material in a way that is not only findable, but somewhat disassociating it from the narrative that was and continues to be associated with Watts ’65. As with anyone making decisions on the the manner in which something is classified there is no way in which to not be subjective and this is largely where the ethical questions come in. We must ensure that we do not encode the material in a way that is counterproductive to goal of the library. We can only strive to be very conscious that what we are doing is indeed placing an opinion or connotation on a work or material that will be made available to others and which will coincidentally be read a certain way because of how it has been labeled. This level of responsibility is daunting and I believe none of us what to misrepresent the community for which this material is largely being sourced for or perpetuate the negative and inaccurate narrative that is displayed in some of these works. An issue I run into then is describing the material that is an inaccurate or highly biased representation for how do I list what it is (for example an article describing Watts 65 as a senseless riot) without perpetuating that narrative? I sometimes feel as if a disclaimer is necessary and maybe tags could be implemented in this way.

After our work is done I believe it is really important for the Southern California Library to review our progress and decide whether we were able to accomplish the goals of this project. I think that we as outsiders not only to the community, but to the day to day of the SCL we are only superficially able to gage what may be most appropriate or findable for the researchers that utilize their space. We have done a lot of reading not only on Watts, but on history, the power of narrative and the voices that are silenced, the manner in which one classifies information, archives material and how this can aid facilitating a counter history and that along with speakers and visits to the SCL have prepared us to approach this with a certain consciousness that we may not have otherwise had. Yet although we’ve come with the right intentions and a social justice awareness I still fear that it may not translate once the material and their classification is reviewed which is largely why I look to them to critique it. Are we being too cautious in our descriptions as we were considering ethics, the needs of the SCL, the South LA community and researchers not affiliated to the library- should we have valued one of these more than the others, would that have made our descriptions and subject terms better and more attuned to the SCL’s goal as a library? I know we were all very apprehensive about representing the materials accurately and I still don’t know if this can be done for the material themselves aren’t always accurate representations of things that have happened, but with a comprehensive tagging system that makes that known and a controlled vocabulary I think we can a least create a foundation that will facilitate this. After that is reviewed we can then continue to implement that until it is established enough to have others work within that system as well.

Week 5: More Questions Than Answers

Remarkably for such a central part of our lives, we stand for the most part in formal ignorance of the social and moral order created by these invisible, potent entities. Their impact is indisputable, and as Foucault reminds us, inescapable…Each standard and each category valorizes some point of view and silences another. This is not a bad thing—indeed it is inescapable. But it is an ethical choice, and as such it is dangerous—not bad but dangerous.

What kind of ethical choices are we making and/or what kind of ethical questions should we be asking ourselves?

I think that this is a very important question to ask when assigning / creating metadata to digital objects, as the ethical implications of our decisions are at once subtle and simultaneously so significant. Whether it is the language used in our descriptions, the keywords we choose to associate with certain artifacts, or the very artifacts we choose to digitize — all of these decisions have an impact on the way this digital material is understood, accessed, and organized. The type of questions that I believe we should be asking ourselves are: what does this description privilege or choose to foreground? Does the description not only accurately reflect the content of the piece, but is the information included relevant to a diverse audience with disparate interests? Do the keywords or subject terms allow for a wide range of access? Are they targeted solely at an academic audience or would a member of the community who is not a part of that discourse be able to search for and discover these materials? Disrupting notions of “classification” as a form of science or a matter of absolute precision is key in understanding the ethical implications of this process. This is not Linnaean taxonomy or the logical hierarchy of C++ (both of which have their own implicit ideological underpinnings) but seemingly a much more subtle, complex system in which to work. It is difficult not to view this process as “dangerous” and therefore implicitly “bad” — but rather, in asking these questions and attempting at the very least to answer them; in incorporating those answers into our process; in checking and rechecking that process as it develops: all are measures to improve our work, diversify our language, and disrupt the own hierarchies of information that we ourselves have valorized, allowing those “silences” to perhaps speak.

I think the biggest pitfall that I have encountered thus far is a question of “vocabulary.” Emblematic of this is the question of what to call the events that transpired in Watts in 1965 (though is it really fair to ascribe those events to Watts specifically; was this not really Los Angeles incident?). Watts Riot, Watts Uprising, Watts Revolt, Watts Rebellion and the ever-popular Watts Upsurge — all of these at one point or another have gained traction in popular parlance. “Watts Riot,” though we understand that this is a problematic characterization of the events, is the most widely-used and popular of the phrases. Would it not therefore stand that this should be our preferred keyword or tag, as it would more than likely be the way that the majority of accessors would search for this material? Or rather should we eschew it in favor of more sympathetic, complex phrases like “Watts Uprising” or “Watts Rebellion” (interestingly, the latter has a presence on Google Trends while the former does not) at the risk of limiting access or visibility? Further risks include (the deliberate avoidance of) editorializing — by appearing to be neutral are we implicitly denying our own biases and agendas inside of this process? And further to this, are we doing the SCL a disservice by allowing the material to “stand on its own,” as Youssef has consistently emphasized the need to relate this material to our contemporary moment? How this relates to generating tags or keywords or producing metadata might seem tangential, but I do believe that we must ask ourselves these questions as we work through this process.

I believe self-reflexivity and an openness to criticism / feedback are essential in improving my work on this project. I think that while all of us take pride in the work we do, that sense of intellectual security cannot come at the expense of creating a functional, open, well-sourced and well-index archive of material. I think that in incorporating a multitude of voices in the feedback we receive, we are more likely to make “materials findable to multiple audiences.” The differences in the ways that we speak / think / organize information / develop associations and connotations will ensure that our metadata is exposed to a multitude of voices and opinions. The question of accuracy is problematic and one that I have struggled with when generating metadata for the digital material. Am I the arbiter then of what is “accurate?” Though many of the digital objects did in fact have locatable titles, authors, and dates attached to them, those that did not were assigned names and creators that I ascribed to them. This process was one informed by the material, but it was still one predicated on the decisions I made. Deconstructing a stable notion of what is “accurate,” checking and rechecking the material, consulting with my peers, and allowing the objects to “speak” for themselves as much as possible would all be helpful steps in improving the quality of my work.

Week 5: The Ethics of Metadata

The importance of ethics when undertaking the responsibility of classification cannot be overstated. In considering this responsibility I am reminded of research I did on Native American author, Mourning Dove and her novel Cogewea: The Half Blood. At one point Mourning Dove was considered the first Native American Woman author, however, much of the scholarship revolving around her and her novel is centered on a man named Lucullus McWhorter. McWhorter was an anthropologist interested in Native American culture and history. He met Mourning Dove at a local event and the two developed a correspondence about her writing and McWhorter later became the editor of her novel. However, the two had different ideas about the story her novel would tell. While Mourning Dove had the intentions of writing a “western romance,” McWhorter was intent on selling the novel as a text about the Native American experience. Against her will, McWhorter pushed an “authentic looking” Native American depiction of Mourning Dove on the cover, added epitaphs before each chapter, and more. In all my research on the text , I would say the most frequently cited quote is Mourning Dove’s statement in a letter to McWhorter:

“I felt like it was some one else’s book and not mine at all. In fact, the finishing touches are put there by you, and I have never seen it.”

Some critics believe that McWhorter’s role in the processing, packaging and even the content of Mourning Dove’s novel was so large that Mourning Dove’s authorship is invalidated. What is most upsetting is not that McWhorter’s agenda is so apparent in Mourning Dove’s novel but is that Mourning Dove’s text has not received the critical attention it deserves or reached the audience it intended because the discourse is so focused on McWhorter. McWhorter injected himself into Mourning Dove’s text and to this day that is the only narrative in circulation.

Cogewea

I have included this story because it is a cautionary tale of what not to do. While McWhorter’s role was editor and not someone who implemented a digital classification system, one can read his choice of picture on the cover of the text as a title, and his epitaph’s as a form of metadata. In fact, it is important to note that McWhorter, as an anthropologist, most likely had a scholarly audience in mind, as opposed to Mourning Dove, who was interested in writing a western romance. Thus, As students working with metadata for documents and materials pertaining to the Watts Rebellion, it is impossible to know the full story behind each document, but it is our responsibility to not only make these documents available via the most ethical classification system but also, in doing so, to honor the history of the community and the requests of the Southern California Library.

One of the most challenging parts of this project will be keeping audience in mind. In order for this to be done ethically, these materials must be accessible to both scholarly researchers and members of the community. One way I can imagine functioning is by balancing tags and metadata heavy with academic or governmental jargon with appropriate synonyms. The other challenging aspect will be representing the materials accurately. My answer to the question of whether or not we can represent these materials accurately is: I’m not sure. As an academic I want to be an extremely well researched on a topic before I make any public claims about it. Thus, my inclination in representing these materials via metadata and tagging is to approach it like I would writing a seminar paper: research, research research. However, becoming an expert on each document is simply not possible given the reasonable time constraints, yet, this is an issue I still struggle with.

A question I am left with is this: When it comes to metadata and tagging, is it better to take a minimalist approach or to include a large amount of metadata, which risks creating a narrative for an object before a user has read the material themselves?

Week 5: Representation: Re-presenting a Lexicon?

After only a little bit of time with the metadata of the materials, but with more time actually handling the materials while in Critical Methodologies last year, I find that it has become easier to provide tags to pieces of the material due to their correlation. With more experience with the materials and more reading of the materials I know the story of Watts in order to better see the connections between the pieces which then build or tell a more coherent narrative of the events of and leading up to 1965. With this in mind I know that reading the Gerald Horne text, along with viewing things like the documentary of Watts helped in my being better able to approach the material confidently. Last year when creating the metadata for an object, it was daunting to attempt to claim a voice or a stance to speak from for the materials, the people who wrote them, or the people who participated in the events. But with a broader (not deeper) knowledge of the events I thought more as a historian being able to weave the pieces together to create a more cohesive narrative, one that even if I was not a part of, I knew well enough to show the highlights of details.

I believe it was this history that then allowed a better approach to creating the different naming/tagging schema, because I then knew how a historian such as Gerald Horne approached or used a subject term, versus how I as an Literature academic would use a term, versus how a layman or other academically minded person would speak or seek for these terms. I would then recommend that for this project to continue the lexicon continues to build, but only when the people who provide additional terms knows the history/context of those terms, and can then wisely and ethically feel appropriate to tag and utilize them. The same then applies to all of us currently creating this lexicon; we read and were introduced to many of the historical, socio-economic, and political occurrences and problems which lead to Watts ’65, but should continue to pull our terms from the documents and our own research with and understanding of the context of the use.

As for presenting/representing materials accurately, I do believe it is possible, but only with the utmost research, skill and knowledge of these histories, contexts, and realities of the people who created the documents and artifacts. Until that person is brought forth to this project, I may not be as comfortable, ethically and academically, to release these to the public as “fact”. I therefore ask myself this question. The theory of Roland Barthes allows for your personal understanding of items to come to bear upon that item in order to interpret the item, or in his words, to possibly re-present them. This term, to re-present, means precisely the idea that a thing is presented again, always in a different light than in which it was founded, for it is re-presented in one’s interpretation. Are we re-presenting material from the Watts ’65 riot with all of our interpretations, or allowing the objects to represent themselves? After all of our class readings, discussions, and personal musings on the issue, I believe we have all stepped forward cautiously and with the intent to allow the self-representation, letting the materials speak for themselves, and setting our interpretations of them to the side in order to better understand the context and history in which these pieces were produced. This then allowed an unbiased and open minded approach to all the terminology of the materials, from which we have then built an ethical and critically minded lexicon, with which I am becoming more and more comfortable with every interaction with an object that tells me its story.