"Security through obscurity"

Truly inclusive metadata sometimes involves not describing at all.

Some of you know that I used to work as a web designer. Back in the early days of the Internet, we sometimes used the phrase “security through obscurity” when we wanted to control access to a web page but didn’t have the capacity to put it behind a login. Instead, we put it on a page that wasn’t linked anywhere else and then sent people the link directly. The idea was that by making the content harder to access, we provided a measure of control. Of course, this strategy was naïve, and the Internet works differently now, but this concept came to mind during a recent client workshop.

Can metadata be poetry?

I've been thinking a lot lately about Robin Coste Lewis' book, Voyage of the Sable Venus and other poems, in which she crafted a narrative poem out of nothing but metadata--the titles and descriptions--from works of art depicting Black women. These text-beds came from the (mostly Western) museums, libraries, and archives where the works are held, and thus form a dataset of attitudes, beliefs, and assumptions about Black women and the place they hold in our world. The poem is structured with a Prologue, two opening sections, and eight "Catalogs" that correspond roughly to different time periods, from ancient Greece and Rome to the present.

It's a beautiful, ambitious, often challenging work, as you might imagine a poem built from these sometimes terse, reductive descriptions would be. The Prologue reminded me of a cataloging guide, explaining the rules Lewis set herself for sourcing, sequencing, and altering the texts. They are lovely in their own right:

Writing and Speaking

I can't believe I haven't written to you since October! It's been a busy season, with speaking and writing work beginning to take up a bigger chunk of my time, so I thought I'd take this space to reflect a little on this journey (and do a little shameless self-promotion). Hopefully you'll also find some interesting resources along the way.

When I first hung my shingle in late 2020 as a "DEI Metadata Consultant" I had no idea if that was even a thing. I had a vague idea that institutions might need help bringing their metadata in line with their DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) goals, but I didn't really know what the work might look like. As it turns out, it's been a mix of lots of things, from developing custom taxonomies and metadata schemas to straight-up data clean up and normalization. I'm even in the midst of processing a paper collection! Most (but not all) of these projects have had a social justice or reparative angle, but the type of work I have consistently come back to is writing and speaking. I write as part of my work, of course, creating documentation, work plans, etc. and speak regularly in webinars and trainings. But I have also quickly learned that in order to keep doing the metadata work—to find that next gig—I have to keep writing and speaking publicly, whether it is a project proposal, a conference paper, or ahem, a newsletter.

On Saturday, September 24, I had the honor of attending a ceremony at the Japanese American National Museum for the unveiling of "Irei: National Monument for the WWII Japanese American Incarceration." The Irei is a multi-faceted project commemorating the 125,266 (finally, an actual number!) Japanese Americans who were incarcerated during World War II.

The project is essentially a list of the names of each incarcerated person, recorded in a book, a website, and as light projections that will appear at eight incarceration sites—Amache, Jerome, Heart Mountain, Manzanar, Minidoka, Poston, Rohwer, and Tule Lake—in 2024.

Like the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial, the project overwhelms with the sheer number of names, driving home the impact of the incarceration and moving it from the realm of vague abstraction to that of the undeniably personal. The oversize book, whose covers are embedded with ceramic plates made with earth from each of the 75 sites where Japanese Americans were imprisoned, will be on view at the Japanese American National Museum for a year.

ARTchivist's Notebook: DALL-E & Me, or Alt text as AI instructions

By now you're probably familiar with AI image generators DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and others. (An image created by Midjourney recently won a prize at the Colorado State Fair.) These artificial intelligences, fattened on enormous image banks, have a broader "knowledge" of art history—no, image history—than most of us. (I say "knowledge" in quotes because I'm not sure whether AI's "know" things in the same way humans do, but that's a subject for another time.) Due to the vastness of their learning base, they can create incredibly convincing, original digital images in a matter of moments from nothing but basic text prompts.

As an art writer and archivist, I've spent a lot of time doing the opposite—turning images into text. I have described a large number of artworks to analyze and critique them, but also simply to share something of the experience of seeing them. As an archivist I have assigned keywords and written image descriptions and alt text, also with the intention of providing broader access to visual works. The image descriptions and alt text I've written help people who use a screen reader get a sense of the images they encounter on the Internet. (If you're not familiar with image description and alt text, the Cooper Hewitt has an excellent guide.)

It recently occurred to me that the descriptions I've spent so much time producing might have another use: as instructions for an AI. I was particularly curious to see what an AI would do with alt text, which is created with the express purpose of conjuring an image in the mind of a person who can't see it clearly or at all. What would alt text conjure in the "mind" of the AI?

Should you use the term "decolonize"?

When I started my DEI metadata consulting business about 18 months ago, I thought it would be cool to say I was "decolonizing data". That was the buzzword at the time; I had written an article about how a museum was "decolonizing" its collection; I even registered a domain name. But thankfully the good librarian in me took over, and I decided to learn more about the term, what it means and where it came from. I was lucky to come across "Decolonization is not a metaphor" by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Wang, and it stopped me cold in my tracks. Not only should I not use that term glibly, I needed to rethink what I do as a metadata professional and writer committed to accurate and respectful representation of marginalized peoples.

I recently revisited the article in an Indigenous study group, and was reminded of the radical nature of its argument. For Tuck and Yang, decolonization is unequivocally tied to land and the resources and responsibilities that come with it. All American wealth and power proceeds from our usurpation of the land, our exploitation of its resources, and our attempted eradication and replacement of Indigenous people. Unless we are actively engaged in giving the land back—every inch of it—we should not say we are "decolonizing" anything. Decolonization requires an upheaval as world-changing as the one that imperialism and colonization wrought in the first place. Every structure, every institution, every value we hold as a society is part of the settler colonial project of domination, exploitation, and abuse.

Style Guides: An unexpected resource for DEI in metadata

(Screenshot of a slide from our Society of American Archivists Reparative Description Webinar)

Last month, I had the honor of co-teaching (with Stephanie Luke) an SAA webinar on reparative description for archives. For the uninitiated, reparative description is the practice of correcting or updating library and archives catalogs and finding aids to more accurately and respectfully represent the people described therein. This might mean updating or replacing derogatory terms, writing contextual notes to mitigate harm, or editing overly laudatory language describing collection creators and donors.

Like lots of people, I've been playing Artle, the new Wordle-esque game from the National Gallery of Art. Each day brings a new challenge, in the form of an artwork drawn from the museum's collections. The image is stripped of any identifying information, and you have four tries to guess the artist. Each wrong guess unveils another piece by the same artist, providing more grist for art historical muscle memory. Like Wordle, it's a tiny dopamine roller coaster, as one's pride dips with each failed attempt, and exalts with each correct identification.

In the above example, it took me three tries to identify the titan Titian (clearly the Italian Renaissance is not my forté), and it was only because the third image was of a work I already knew to be his, Venus and Adonis. Without such familiarity, I felt strangely adrift, and it made me reflect on the reassuring cocoon of metadata that museums typically provide: title, date, medium, country of origin, etc. Without these moorings, we are left to rely on our own memories, or something even more wispy, which I'll call "feel."

"Feel" is like the quality Malcolm Gladwell identifies in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. He describes how certain experts are able to make snap judgments that turn out to be correct, not because they did extensive research on the particular question at hand, but because they can draw upon accumulated experience that has become second nature. One recent Artle, a painting I had never seen before, just struck me as "Rembrandt-y," and low and behold, it was! (Pats self on back.) I was less sure about another, by Jean Dubuffet, but that guess also paid off. In this case, Artle actually expanded my knowledge of an artist with whom I had only a glancing acquaintance.

Metadata-tion

Records are like clouds

Credit: Dmitry Makeev, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The role of corporate archives in truth and reconciliation

In listening to the podcast episode "How Companies Reckon with Past Wrongdoing" from HBR Ideacast, I learned about a role in corporate archives I hadn't thought of before: truth and reconciliation researcher.

The podcast, and its accompanying article, "How Companies Can Address Their Historical Transgressions," delves into problematic company histories and how present-day corporate leaders are responding to them (or not). (The podcast is free, but you may need a subscription to read the article.)

University of Baltimore professor Sarah Federman talks about her research into the World War II history of the French National Railways (SNCF), a company traditionally celebrated because railway workers sabotaged trains on D-Day in solidarity with the Resistance. However, another side of that history didn't come to light until the 1990s when it was revealed that the company had also transported tens of thousands of Jews to the German border, where they were sent on to Auschwitz.

Archives as time travel

The past is never dead. It's not even past. -- William Faulkner

It's a new year, still shadowed by COVID, and I wish the recent past could die. But even amid the malaise of a seemingly eternal pandemic, there are things to be excited about, chiefly season 2 of "Beforeigners," which came out a few weeks ago on HBO Max. (This post will be a bit familiar if you follow me on LinkedIn, where I posted about the first season.) In the Norwegian show, it's as if the archives come to life in the middle of a police procedural. What better vehicle for making the past relevant in the present?

If you haven't seen it, the titular "foreigners" are not immigrants from different places, but from different times. Through a mysterious time-travel phenomenon, present-day Oslo has become a temporal mashup, with citizens from the present, the 19th century, the Old Norse world, and prehistoric times cohabitating, each maintaining something of their original way of life. This means sidewalks stacked with crates of chickens, horse-drawn carriages intermingling with cars, and goats roaming the halls of apartment buildings only to become tomorrow night's dinner.

Seeing ourselves in archives

On giving away Auntie's things

(Irene Yamamoto, January 1978)

The White Gaze

Is photography inherently racist?

The Getty's exhibition "Photo Flux: Unshuttering LA" (which closed on Oct. 10) explores the ways photographers of color attempt to unsettle photography's traditional "white gaze," or the assumption that "the photographer is white and their subject is the passive receptor of the white gaze as a subject of fascination, beauty, or shock."

Looting in metadata

Representing the provenance of stolen items

It's no longer surprising to hear how the treasures in the world's museums were acquired through pillaging, theft or illegal export. Hyperallergic's recent article about looted Cambodian antiquities in the collections of The Met and the British Museum is just the latest in a long string of examples. These Khmer Dynasty artifacts were stolen, removed from their original cultural and sacred contexts, and in some cases partially destroyed or damaged. (The Buddha's head that illustrates Hyperallergic's story was most likely severed from its body in order to be "collected.")

In my work designing the metadata schema and taxonomy for Curationist.org, an online aggregator of Open Access cultural heritage content, we've discussed how such troubling provenance data could be more accurately represented. Here's a slide we presented at MozFest in March 2021 critiquing the way one of the Benin Bronzes, a hotly contested group of objects stolen from Benin (present-day Nigeria), was represented on The Met's online Open Access site.