This week’s topic was, for the first time since I began this class, not completely unfamiliar to me. Working at Texas A&M’s student newspaper, my team and I often utilize metadata to organize our photos so that we can recall them at any point of time, even if they were taken five years ago. While we don’t often rely on old photos, being able to recall old photos of important university staff members or memorable events is integral to describing certain stories. However, my most recent encounter with metadata was not so positive, as it actually caused a significant problem for one of our recently published issues.
Due to the COVID-19 health guidelines, our own staff photographers have not been able to take pictures at most events and has forced us to use photos provided by the university. To help organize the photos into manageable groups, each has its own set of metadata to describe who is in the photo, where it was taken, and what the event details were. While the metadata was incredibly helpful in finding specific groups of photos for the issue, the was some incorrect data that caused someone to be completely misidentified. As a newspaper, a mistake like this can be incredibly detrimental to a reputation and at the time it certainly felt as though it could be.
As we recognized the problem, we contacted the university department that we had received the photos from in order to understand what had gone wrong in the process. It turns out that a student intern has mistakenly entered the wrong information into the metadata, causing a significant identity mistake and a prominently displayed problem for our publication. I purposely left the details of this situation vague because it was quite embarrassing for our editorial staff. However, I always invite everyone to check out the newspaper, so if you are look for a little scavenger hunt, check out our recent issues and see if you can spot the mistake. It’s like a very unfortunate game of “Where’s Waldo?” This situation, in combination with my new knowledge on metadata, shows how important it is to organize information on a blog or website so that individuals have access to user-friendly and correct information. While I believe many of us are more worried about how well the features of our blogs are displaying, it’s important to keep in mind that the information should also be correct and take users to exactly what they are looking for.
Beyond the use of metadata, this week’s lesson solidified my appreciation of Jekyll’s interpretive abilities. Jekyll’s simplification of YAML data helps expediate the inclusion of document modifying features such as the layouts, titles, and most recently, the categories. This helps simplify the process for blog additions and helps me understand why certain information belongs in specific places in a more visual way.