Good morning from the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, here in beautiful Victoria, BC. I’m sure some of you east coasters are deep into your Day of DH, and I can’t wait to see what you all have been up to. I work here:

And in front of these beautiful machines I fulfill my duties as Metadata Architect in the ETCL. You are probably wondering (as I get asked all the time) What exactly is a Metadata Architect? Well. Contrary to how it may sound, I do not spend my days filling Dublin Core fields or indexing mass amounts of documentation. As the boss-man, Ray Siemens, describes it, I generate information about information. Ok. Now we’re getting somewhere…

As the ETCL’s Metadata Architect, I generate information about a few different streams of information (degrees of vagueness slip away). Let’s get more specific. On one hand, I continue my work on the Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript, responsibilities I took on as a graduate research assistant while completing my MA in English at the University of Victoria. On the other hand, I research and write about social knowledge creation practices within multiple knowledge communities, from the editorial board of traditional peer reviewed journals to citizen scholars on Wikipedia. On still another hand (yes, it’s important to have many hands in the digital humanities) I liason between INKE (Implementing New Knowledge Environments) research area leads and other stakeholders or interested parties. With this hand, I hold meetings, synthesize projects, needs, and areas of interest, and develop reports and other documents for dissemination.

Phew. Hopefully that clears things up! Now, to start my day…