Metadata (The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series) by Jeffrey Pomerantz

Author:Jeffrey Pomerantz
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9783319034379
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2015-11-13T06:00:00+00:00

Figure 12

As of this writing, the NSDL seems to be the only organization that is using the term “paradata” to mean “use metadata about educational resources.” The NSDL is, however, certainly not the only organization to collect paradata. Over the past few years, “dashboards” have become a common tool for the presentation of data about websites and other online systems. Google Analytics, for example, is a well-known system for collecting detailed use data about websites. Many “learning management systems”—platforms for hosting online course content and discussions—collect data about students’ use of the materials, and progress through the course. This figure, for example, shows some dashboard data from a massive open online course (MOOC) about metadata that the author taught through Coursera. Dashboards in some other education platforms present even more finely grained user data so that, for example, a teacher can identify individual students who may be falling behind their classmates as well as specific lessons those students are having trouble with.

Referring to use data as use metadata is a fairly new development, and in fact slightly problematic. Collecting data about the use of resources is, of course, nothing new: web server software has included functionality to collect logs for almost as long as web servers have existed. Prior to the existence of web server logs, libraries collected data about books checked out, museums collected data about foot traffic through galleries, grocery stores collected data about which items were purchased and with which other items, etc. All of these are varieties of use data, but no one refers to them as use metadata.

This may be why terms such as “data exhaust” and “paradata” have been coined: to refer to use data, while simultaneously making it clear that such data is separate from the more traditional conception of metadata. “Data exhaust” is a useful term, but it is not very widely used, and it is not yet clear if the term “paradata” will come to be widely used. It is clear, however, that use metadata is a large and growing topic of interest, and that we are currently seeing rapid change in this arena, as software is developed to capture and analyze the wide variety of types of use metadata. As this development progresses, there will be an increasing need for clarity around terminology for use metadata: in the context of web servers this data is often called “logs,” in the context of other online resources it is often called “analytics.” In the context of still other services, it is often simply called “data.”

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