Metadata, infrastructure, and computer‐mediated communication in historical perspective

Abstract

In this paper we describe the creation and use of metadata on the early Arpanet as part of normal network function. By using the Arpanet Host-Host Protocol and its sockets as an entry point for studying the generation of metadata, we show that the development and function of key Arpanet infrastructure can be studied by examining the creation and stabilization of metadata. More specifically, we use the Host-Host Protocol's sockets as an example of something that, at the level of the network, functions as both network infrastructure and metadata simultaneously. By presenting the function of sockets in tandem with an overview of the Host-Host Protocol, we argue for the further integrated study of infrastructure and metadata. Finally, we reintroduce the concept of infradata to refer specifically to data that locate data throughout an infrastructure and are required by the infrastructure to function, separating them from established and stabilized standards. We argue for the future application of infradata as a concept for the study of histories and political economies of networks, bridging the largely library and information science (LIS) study of metadata with the largely science and technology studies (STS) domain of infrastructure.

Making and taking information

“…Similarly, a particular genre of information might be critical to its takeability and makeability. As a whole, a key prerequisite of being able to link particular modes of information making and taking can be expected to be a certain degree of common ground or in a figurative sense, infra-data (Fidler & Acker, 2017) that functions in tandem in an infrastructural sense to enable a transition from information made to information taken. Some of the pertinent questions are, however, what is the impact of nature and (in)compatibilities of specific practices, activities, and processes of making and taking information, the role of particular conditions of these activities, and how the "packaging" of information in documents and information objects or embeddedness in activities and social exchange affects what is done and what can be done.…”

The Seer and the Seen: Surveying Palantir’s Surveillance Platform

“…Metadata are thus helpful for identifying digital traces and connecting widely divergent data that may otherwise have remained non-interoperable (Fidler and Acker 2017;Mayernik and Acker 2018). Standardizing this metadata for such linking purposes in larger projects requires what information science knows as an "ontology," which is a highly regulated set of formal metadata rules, terms, values, and relationships with which different groups of people or machines may serialize, tag, and model their data (Pomerantz 2015).…”

Death in the Timeline

“…Internet historian, Bradley Fidler has written widely about the origination, improvisation, and calcification of network standards and protocols in early internet architectures as metadata relates to infrastructure. 32 The classification theorist Melanie Feinberg's extensive and beguiling method for reading databases as whole works is another example of understanding metadata collections in context. 33 Elsewhere, Michael Buckland has discussed metadata standards as infrastructure with which to interpret patterns of thought and action that can be found in collections of documents within the information systems that we use to create, organize, and name the human lifeworld.…”