On Metadata and Metalife

The Fifteen Boxes of Wordbooks Ready for Donation (5 December 2011)
After weeks of working at it, weeks of searching the house for dictionaries and other books of language hiding in nooks, weeks of putting them into boxes, I  have not prepared exactly 15 boxes of an estimated 80 or so for donation to the University at Albany.

The process is complicated by two major factors:

First, years ago, I abandoned entering information on each of my books into my database of books, because I'd switched back to Macintosh computers and had not purchased a database program for that environment. I still haven't, but I've found one ancient functioning Windows laptop, and I'm updating the database there. The data I collect on each book is quite extensive, so I have spent many hours collecting metadata on books I'll soon no longer own.

Second, I have never finished covered the dust jackets of each dustjacketed book I own. Certainly, this is a ridiculous process, and one more ridiculous when I'm focused on books I am about to give away, but it has the value of protecting the books from damage (or further damage), no matter where they exist.

Unfortunately, I've been working on this project, various parts of it, for months, so I should be further along. But it's more complicated that simply books. I'm also preparing my papers for donation. And even though a good percentage of those are in perfect order, quite a bit remains unorganized. When I'm not working on organizing books, I'm focused on organizing my personal papers, and I have three boxes of an estimated ten of those in perfect order. But about half of what remains is in order, they just don't fill entire boxes yet.

As part of my papers, I'm organizing the digital files relating to these papers, primarily digital audio and video, though I may also prepare collections of digital photographs for donation as well. All of which takes time, even though most of these collections are in nearly perfect order.

Just as I have pulled too much data into my life, I have created too much data during it. And all of this information is somehow information about my life, metadata about me.

So that I do not so much live a life of flesh and blood and sex and hunger as I lead a life of data, in multiple formats both digital and analog. If the data all disappeared, I myself would disappear, even if my breathing body remained.


ecr. l'inf.