blog.humaneguitarist.org

metadata is like the Muppets and Italian film

[Sat, 11 Jan 2014 16:20:00 +0000]
A couple of years ago, I was - against the better judgment of a friend - asked to give a guest class lecture at NC Central University [http://www.nccu.edu/] on OAI [http://www.openarchives.org/], metadata harvesting, etc. for her metadata class at their school of library and information sciences. Apparently, it went badly enough that I was asked the next year to try and get it right by that year's instructor. I'm not sure if I did get it right after all, but I wanted to post the presentation slides all the same. They're here [http://blog.humaneguitarist.org/uploads/20130401_ncCentral-metadata-lecture.pdf]. It's a little silly - using a Muppet motif throughout, but I think my main points got across. I think people are much more likely to get something if looked at in real-world terms (as if the Muppets are real). A little sense of humor doesn't hurt either. I'd like to say that the "splash" page, a movie poster for Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blow Up [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060176/], is the best part. It's all downhill from there, no doubt. To me, the film made no "sense" until the last, surreal scene of people playing tennis without a ball put it all together for me. It was as if the entire film was a Subject and a string of Adverbs until the last scene, the Verb. I let the class know this ... and asked them to remember that while putting up with my presentation. IMAGE: "Blow Up movie poster"[http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JPTyK1Kzq3I/TaL42kCZR9I/AAAAAAAAdwM/7NPTAH4y3is/s1600/BLOW%2BUP%2BPOSTER2.jpg]