Probably 2: Data About Data
That web search for “diane wilson barn” that I screenshotted in the previous segment worked to find that photograph of her in her barn amidst tumbling piles of stuff because of metadata. Because the designers and maintainers of PECE wanted that photograph to be accessible, as qualitative data, to anyone who looked for it, we made PECE so that, as archival infrastructure, it outfitted that image file with metadata that would make it FAIR – findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-usable.
In trying to understand what qualitative data are, and what metadata are, we’re at risk of being misled by language. That previous sentence casts two distinct entities, data and metadata; data are the first noun-object, and then a different noun-object named infrastructure was said “to outfit” (verb) that first noun-object with a second noun-object, metadata. So when we are talking or writing like normal people talk or write, we write that “metadata is data about data:” two different things, and one is (made to be) “about” the other.
It's all well and good to talk normally. You can accomplish a lot, and no one gets confused or frustrated. But because data and metadata are a little bit not normal, their somewhat perverse nature will require a bit of perversity on the part of language as well.
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The title above writes data and metadata together, divided, as meta/data. In this instance as in so many others, we follow Gayatri Spivak’s advice to “honor the slash”: respect this foreign entrant, awkward and a bit haughty, treasure what it’s there to remind you of.
The slash of meta/data reminds us, first, that “data” is not a self-sufficient entity; data can’t stand alone and needs, absolutely has to have, metadata. This is not a controversial or debatable claim; not only would no librarian or archivist disagree, no scientist would either. Data about data is essential to data. If you don’t want to go so far as to say that interpretation is essential to data, how about: data without data about data is meaningless. Data without metadata is useless. Data is essentially relational, and that necessary relationality introduces movement, a difference slashing the relational unit: meta/data.
To emphasize the stringency of these matters, we can write them as a formal principle, with three versions:
Version 1: If data, then metadata.
Version 2: Data if and only if metadata
Version 3: Only ever meta/data.
The photograph is data because, unlike the stuff in Diane’s barn, it is available and discoverable, and it is available and discoverable because it has metadata. Hence a first proposition, in various expressions, on our way to establishing rigor:
(A1v1) Data if and only if metadata.
(A1v2) If metadata, then data.
(A1v3) Data is anything with metadata.
(A1v4) Only meta/data.[1]
From which it follows logically that:
(B1) Availability if and only if meta/data.
But by the additional proposition –
(C1v1) Meta/data if and only if archive.
–we can then conclude that
(C1v2) Availability if and only if archive
Availability of data requires that there be a place prepared for it, a place that someone must have readied and now maintains. (This by the Law of Meta/data Hospitality and its Domestic Care Clause, which I have proven elsewhere.)
Given (A1), (B1), and (C1), then by the Law of Archive Fever (also proven elsewhere):
(D1) Availability IFF archon (power/authority/ruler/State/G-d/SysAdmin).
analyzed the cultural formations in and through which we differentiate and confer value on our knowledges and knowledge-making practices–ordering them between the poles of positivism and interpretivism, let’s say, since we are all in a hurry–alongside the cultural formations through which we differentiate and confer value on sexualities and sex-making practices, between a norm and its perversions. These two orderings, my analysis tried to show, took on similar patterns, produced by the immaterial but real forces of a cultural field or discursive and social structures. That analysis led me to conclude that (I am summarizing) there are neither Two Cultures nor One, as well as both One Culture and Two. I signified this paradoxical state with the formulation “√2 Cultures,” to index its position outside an integral system.
[1] I could have written an essay on data and data science entirely around marks like “/” that are (absolutely) fundamental to (post)structuralist language ideologies yet annoy the shit out of anyone operating with a representationalist language ideology (which includes all of us, to some meaningful degree). More importantly but not unrelatedly, data science has difficulty accommodating and working with slashed entities that do not coincide with themselves, concepts under erasure, parenthetical traces of meanings, disseminated and transmuting senses, etc. etc. Tl,dr: computers don’t (yet) queer very well and “sense,” as renowned logician Charles Dodgson has shown, is essentially queer, or at least curiouser and curiouser.