This is the keynote address for DH + BH: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Digital Humanities and Book History hosted by the Digital Cultural Studies Cooperative from September 22-24, 2022. The keynote address was delivered on the final day of the conference.
Beginning with the computational contexts within which the term metadata was initially deployed, this talk first addresses ways that the idea may have achieved its belated power within the so-called archival turn and then explores its continued currency. If the notion of the archive can point us toward questions of power, truth, and fiction, then the concept of metadata stands to call our attention to matters of control. While suggesting the fantasy of a total description or a total ontology of information resources, the metadata concept helps to support a particular epistemic frame—vernacular, trenchant, inescapable—in which finding ostensibly equals knowing.
Lisa Gitelman is a media historian whose research concerns American print culture, techniques of inscription, and the new media of yesterday and today. She is particularly concerned with tracing the patterns according to which new media become meaningful within and against the contexts of older media. Her most recent book is entitled Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents and was published by Duke in 2014. Before that, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture was published by the MIT Press in 2006. She holds a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and is a former editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University. She has taught at the Catholic University of America and at Harvard University and is currently Professor in the Departments of English and Media, Culture and Communication at New York University.
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