Aiden - Metadata and Database

 After reading about Metadata and Database and learning the importance of it in any digital humanities projects, I found it particularly relevant to my project which is the 9/11 memorial timeline. While there is minimal data itself in my project, what I immediately thought of was all of the audio recordings and unique pictures, as according to page 29, "Metadata can be attached to objects or records."

There are so many examples of metadata in this project including ID'ing all of the dates, locations, times, and events themselves and aligning them in a way to tell a story while maintaining its strict chronological structure to maintain emersion and keep the audience in the moment with each key event of the day. If this was not a Digital Humanities project and instead was more of a basis 9/11 project, you would have to log everything as separate entities, but in this case you can use what is described in the book as "Descriptive metadata" which the book says is "... Very common. Systems of naming, identifying, and describing objects or entities (including data) are called metadata schemes. Metadata is integral to all systems and activities of knowledge classification. It is essential for organization and access." In the simplest terms, Metadata can be used to combine times, dates, duration of events, etc. into one chronological format, and it was interesting to learn of the intricacies of that process via this weekends reading.

Similarly, database design can be utilized to turn all of the 9/11 data they have into their timeline format. This includes, as the book describes on page 45, "standard metrics, categories, classification systems, and spreadsheets." Rather than going from one event to another to another, using database design you can create an immersive experience that combines everything into one. Once you accomplish that, you have a clean and user-friendly interactive timeline that adds all the data and variables together to tell a story.