The range of metadata needed to run a digital library and preserve its collections in the long term is much more extensive and complicated than anything in its traditional counterpart. It includes the same 'descriptive' information which guides users to the resources they require but must supplement this with comprehensive 'administrative' metadata: this encompasses technical details of the files that make up its collections, the documentation of complex intellectual property rights and th...

This book offers a comprehensive guide to the world of metadata, from its origins in the ancient cities of the Middle East, to the Semantic Web of today.The author takes us on a journey through the centuries-old history of metadata up to the modern world of crowdsourcing and Google, showing how metadata works and what it is made of. The author explores how it has been used ideologically and how it can never be objective. He argues how central it is to human cultures and the way the...

Over the past sixty years, the spectacular growth of the technologies associated with the computer is visible for all to see and experience. Yet, the science underpinning this technology is less visible and little understood outside the professional computer science community. As a scientific discipline, computer science stands alongside the likes of molecular biology and cognitive science as one of the most significant new sciences of the post Second World War era. In this Very Short ...

Making Sense of DesignEffective design is at the heart of everything from software development to engineering to architecture. But what do we really know about the design process? What leads to effective, elegant designs? The Design of Design addresses these questions.These new essays by Fred Brooks contain extraordinary insights for designers in every discipline. Brooks pinpoints constants inherent in all design projects and uncovers processes and patterns...

This cutting-edge text offers an introduction to the emerging field of media archaeology and analyses the innovative theoretical and artistic methodology used to excavate current media through its past.Written with a steampunk attitude, What is Media Archaeology? examines the theoretical challenges of studying digital culture and memory and opens up the sedimented layers of contemporary media culture. The author contextualizes media archaeology in relation to other key med...

Lori Emerson examines how interfaces—from today’s multitouch devices to yesterday’s desktops, from typewriters to Emily Dickinson’s self-bound fascicle volumes—mediate between writer and text as well as between writer and reader. Following the threads of experimental writing from the present into the past, she shows how writers have long tested and transgressed technological boundaries.Reading the means of production as well as the creative works they produce, Emerson demonstrates ...

Confronting the digital revolution in academia, this book examines the application of new computational techniques and visualisation technologies in the Arts & Humanities. Uniting differing perspectives, leading and emerging scholars discuss the theoretical and practical challenges that computation raises for these disciplines.

The Digital Humanities have arrived at a moment when digital Big Data is becoming more readily available, opening exciting new avenues of inquiry but also new challenges. This pioneering book describes and demonstrates the ways these data can be explored to construct cultural heritage knowledge, for research and in teaching and learning. It helps humanities scholars to grasp Big Data in order to do their work, whether that means understanding the underlying algorithms at work in search eng...

For the past few hundred years, Western cultures have relied on print. When writing was accomplished by a quill pen, inkpot, and paper, it was easy to imagine that writing was nothing more than a means by which writers could transfer their thoughts to readers. The proliferation of technical media in the latter half of the twentieth century has revealed that the relationship between writer and reader is not so simple. From telegraphs and typewriters to wire recorders and a sweeping array of...

Composed of 100 bite-sized entries of 400 to 600 words each, Netymology weaves together stories, etymologies and analyses around digital culture's transformation, and creation, of words.Tom Chatfield presents a kaleidoscopic, thought-provoking tour through the buried roots of some of the digital age's most common terms: from the @ and Apple symbols, to HTML and Trojan horses, to the twisted histories of new forms of slang, memes, text messages and gaming terms.There's also ...

From microbiology to nuclear physics and chemistry to software engineering, scientific and technical translation is a complex activity that involves communicating specialized information on a variety of subjects across multiple languages. It requires expert linguistic knowledge and writing skills, combined with the ability to research and understand complex concepts and present them to a range of different audiences. Using a combination of interdisciplinary research, real-world examples dr...

Robert Gehl's timely critique, Reverse Engineering Social Media, rigorously analyzes the ideas of social media and software engineers, using these ideas to find contradictions and fissures beneath the surfaces of glossy sites such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter.Gehl adeptly uses a mix of software studies, science and technology studies, and political economy to reveal the histories and contexts of these social media sites. Looking backward at divisions o...