Metadata - The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series

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Unveiling metadata's ubiquity in our digital world.

If you're intrigued by the skeletons of modern digital frameworks, "Metadata" is worth your attention. It lays bare the unseen yet critical structures that scaffold our information interactions, particularly as privacy concerns rise with agencies like the NSA in the spotlight. Jeffrey Pomerantz crafts an accessible gateway into understanding the complex yet vital world of metadata, making you appreciate the invisible labor that shapes our daily digital experience.

Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.

Metadata - The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series

Regular price $8.90
Unit price
per
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ISBN: 9780262528511
Publisher: The MIT Press
Date of Publication: 2015-11-06
Format: Paperback
Related Collections: Sociology, Business, Science
Goodreads rating: 3.78
(rated by 400 readers)

Description

Everything we need to know about metadata, the usually invisible infrastructure for information with which we interact every day. When "metadata" became breaking news, appearing in stories about surveillance by the National Security Agency, many members of the public encountered this once-obscure term from information science for the first time. Should people be reassured that the NSA was "only" collecting metadata about phone calls—information about the caller, the recipient, the time, the duration, the location—and not recordings of the conversations themselves? Or does phone call metadata reveal more than it seems? In this book, Jeffrey Pomerantz offers an accessible and concise introduction to metadata. In the era of ubiquitous computing, metadata has become infrastructural, like the electrical grid or the highway system. We interact with it or generate it every day. It is not, Pomerantz tells us, just "data about data." It is a means by which the complexity of an object is represented in a simpler form. For example, the title, the author, and the cover art are metadata about a book. When metadata does its job well, it fades into the background; everyone (except perhaps the NSA) takes it for granted. Pomerantz explains what metadata is, and why it exists. He distinguishes among different types of metadata—descriptive, administrative, structural, preservation, and use—and examines different users and uses of each type. He discusses the technologies that make modern metadata possible, and he speculates about metadata's future. By the end of the book, readers will see metadata everywhere. Pomerantz warns us that it's metadata's world, and we are just living in it.
 

Unveiling metadata's ubiquity in our digital world.

If you're intrigued by the skeletons of modern digital frameworks, "Metadata" is worth your attention. It lays bare the unseen yet critical structures that scaffold our information interactions, particularly as privacy concerns rise with agencies like the NSA in the spotlight. Jeffrey Pomerantz crafts an accessible gateway into understanding the complex yet vital world of metadata, making you appreciate the invisible labor that shapes our daily digital experience.

Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.