What Metadata Is and Why It Matters
In this chapter, we introduce the concept of metadata and explain its importance. Metadata is ‘data about data’. It is a human construct, not found in nature, and the form it takes reflects its origins and the purposes for which it is created. Metadata ca
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What Metadata Is and Why It Matters
In May 2013 headlines were made around the world when Edward Snowden, a former employee of the United States Central Intelligence Agency revealed that the country’s National Security Agency (NSA) had been carrying out surveillance on the email and mobile phone activities of millions of people at home and abroad. The net of those under scrutiny was cast so far and wide that it had even picked up some world leaders in its catch: they included Germany’s Angela Merkel who was so incensed that she publicly compared the NSA to the Stasi, the secret police force of the former East Germany [1]. What rapidly emerged from the flurry of headlines that came from these revelations was that the NSA was not employing such classic techniques as phone tapping or the interception of emails, but was instead collecting information about phone conversations, text messages or emails. The news media began using the term metadata to describe information of this type: this was not what was actually said in a phone call or written in a text message but such details as the location of the phone used, the numbers called, the time and dates of calls and so on. Because it was metadata that was being collected, critics of Snowden’s actions claimed that the NSA’s actions were not overly intrusive and could be accepted as the price of national security [2]. Metadata became a commonly-used term in the media during the Snowden affair. But what exactly is metadata? The Guardian newspaper attempted to clarify it for their readers when they published A Guardian guide to your metadata in June 2013: metadata, they said, is “information generated as you use technology…[not] personal or content-specific details, but rather transactional information about the user, the device and activities taking place” [3] [italics added]. The information they referred to in the article is the type generated by Twitter when a Tweet is posted. Figure 1.1 shows something of what it looks like. Even this small sample is enough to show that metadata contains more than The Guardian’s simple definition allows for: it moves well beyond information on the ‘transaction’ of posting a Tweet and enters the realm of the personal. From it we can tell where its author is located, how many followers, friends and favourites they
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 R. Gartner, Metadata, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40893-4_1
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What Metadata Is and Why It Matters
Fig. 1.1 Metadata from a Twitter feed (fictitious and heavily truncated example)
have and when they opened their account; we can also read a description of themselves that they added to their Twitter profile. Obviously there’s more to metadata than ‘transactional’ information alone. Etymology is always a good place to start defining a concept and metadata is no exception. The prefix meta- comes from ancient Greek and is usually translated into English by the preposition about. It is often used to express an idea that is in some way self-reflexive. In linguistics, for instance, a me
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