Metadata plays an essential role in making digital humanities projects productive endeavors that offer useful information to scholars and the general public. The Carbajal and Caswell reading comprehensively addresses the purpose and benefits of metadata as well as how to approach metadata with a critical eye. Most fundamentally, metadata allows for more specific categorization and easier searching of digital records (1106).
The previous module on digitization highlights how the end result of digitization can be the separation of an object from its original cultural context. While metadata may not fully resolve this problem, detailed metadata organized in a thoughtful way can go a long way in restoring some of that context for users. Yet metadata can also introduce new issues of cultural context – any activity involving categorization or description contains inherent cultural biases that should force users to pause and question the choices of the metadata’s creators (1109-1110).
Two digital tools that facilitate the use of metadata for digital humanities projects are Tropy and Omeka. Tropy allows users to import PDFs and images for storage and organizing with tags and other metadata. The software can handle large projects and accepts a wide variety of file types for images. Additionally, after uploading my kitchen item photos during the module activity, Tropy gave me several options for metadata templates rather than forcing me to start from scratch building descriptive categories.
Omeka, while requiring a bit more technical savvy, does an effective job of building on the raw metadata one might include in Tropy and enhancing it for public display online. What I found most beneficial about Omeka was the visual customization options for my items and the corresponding data. It forced me to consider which presentation options would be most appropriate to different types of data and images. And just like with Tropy, Omeka provides a preset Dublin Core of metadata elements which takes some of the burden of developing taxonomy off the creator. As a digital humanities novice, I appreciated having this built-in as a starting point.