Meta-whata: A look at metadata.
This article is about my efforts from start to finish and frustrations to wins of creating metadata that can immerse an audience not just sit stagnant hoping that someone will read it.
Let’s talk about metadata, you know, the information that describes another layer of, well, information. Layers of information often times ignored, sometimes more than someone needs, most times… boring. Which begs the question, is metadata important if everyone ignores most of it; or can it be made interesting something more enjoyable that doesn’t just sit collecting “dust”? This is something that I’ve recently have had the opportunity to explore.
I was challenged to take an audio book, suggestively a book I knew well, and recreate it’s metadata. Admittedly I haven’t read for fun for at least the past two years and I haven’t been big fan of audio books. So there I sat racking my mind for books that I have read and loved books like: The Da Vinci Code, Sookie Stackhouse Novels, A Series of Unfortunate Events, on and on until, Invisible Monsters… Bingo! Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk. Chuck Palahniuk is one of my favorite authors because of his ability to create an unstable, twisted story weaved into reality. Always a shocker and always making a reader ask.. “What the f*** is happening?!” Just me? Possibly. I went to my local library hoping that Invisible Monsters was on audio book, sadly it wasn’t. What my library did have was an audio book copy of Fight Club. The first Palahniuk book and of course the inspiration for what became the cult classic movie “Fight Club.” I mean, Brad Pitt’s piercing blue eyes paired with the fantastic skills of Edward Norton and lines like,
“Now, a question of etiquette do I give you the ass or the crouch?” -Tyler Durden, Fight Club
How could it not become a cult classic?
So, there I was, audio book in hand, excited to begin and that’s where everything began to… well, take a turn for the annoying. Because I own an updated Mac Book and did not think everything through I used my husband’s laptop which is a PC to RIP my audio book and threw it into my Box cloud storage; that way when I got to it I could just download the files to my computer. There were two things that happened. First the five discs ripped and labeled themselves like so:
I had two options, go to the beginning of each file to see if it was the start of a new chapter or listen to Fight Club, the audio book, because what’s a mere five and a half hours of my time? My decision, I listened to audio book. It gave me a refresher of all the insane antics of Tyler Durden and the Narrator; but also because I was trying to create creative metadata I thought this would be a good opportunity to write down chapter titles and attach a dark humored comment to the book. (Chapter titles were not included in the book or the audio book.)
I did this while logged into Box and reordered everything to make it fit giving them temporary titles like: Ch. 1a, Ch. 1b., ect. Here, is where that second road block came into play. I didn’t consider file formats when I RIPed my book. That meant all the files in my Box were .wma files, which don’t work on a Mac. Those five and half hours relabeling all my files into chapters… wasted. Once I converted them into .mp3 formats they re-labeled themselves back into their original shell. Frustrating to say the least, but on the bright side, I had created content that I was excited to use for my metadata.
Once the reformatting of my files were behind me I moved on to creating a content map and began creating artwork for both book cover and chapter art. Because of the nature of Fight Club I knew that I wanted to have a grunged/ dreamlike facade, there’s nothing pretty about Fight Club. Although there is something beautiful about it that I can’t quite but my finger on…
After creating my content I then started building my actual audio book in Audiobook Builder for Mac OS. This was likely the least stressful part of the project. Moving files over, joining the chapters together, and adding the little bit of metadata that I could was a breeze. Special shout out to Audiobook Builder.
After everything was set I built the audio book with each of the settings trying to imagine which one would work the best. Some of the first things I noticed after the transfer is that Jim Colby, the narrator of the audio book, had taken over Chuck Palahniuk’s place as author, an easy fix but a bit troublesome either way. I was also frustrated because of how the artwork I had created was displayed, or not displayed, more like it. I ended up with going with the audio book that separated each chapter. I had gone too deep into the rabbit hole not to use the comments that I created and sectioning everything off I wouldn’t be able to use most of the facts, comments, and thoughts that I had come up with.
Than came the task of entering data and how I would like it to look. Did I want to display chapters;or just keep the name as I knew they would automatically situate themselves?A question that I needed to test is where do I put the comments I have in the comment section or the description? I wasn’t describing anything and I liked how you could see comments once you opened the “about” section instead of tabbing over to the description. I put my comments in a few of the chapters and began testing.
I tested on three different platforms my iPad Pro, Galaxy S7, and my car stereo to see what I could see. Admittedly it was fun to see my project on the different platforms, but I noticed that not all my work had transferred over like I was expecting, no hoping,
On my iOS device I was pretty disappointed that I couldn’t find my comments easily. But I was happy about how it was displayed. I was actually pretty surprised that I couldn’t find some of the metadata that I had entered since I was going from Apple to Apple product.
I was worried about how my book would transfer from Mac to Android. That being said, I was pleasantly surprised by how well it did transfer over. I knew things wouldn’t be exact, but the app that I downloaded to made it easy to navigate to the metadata. I was also pleased to see that my decision to put my comments in the comments section helped it be seen to whoever was wondering around the “Get Info” tab. The one thing I was disappointed in was that my chapter art was not displayed; although there was an option to change the art within the app itself.
Simple and to the point. There was nothing extra, no metadata displayed, just title and author. Again there was a slight disappointment but it didn’t linger too long.
Through testing, I asked some coworkers and friends to explore the audio book on both my iOS and Android devices before continuing to add all my metadata comments. Here’s what I discovered:
None of them looked at the metadata.
After I had them look at my book for a couple minutes I asked them about the metadata, nobody had looked that deep into my creation. Nobody cared and even more so a couple of them had no clue what metadata even was.
My eye twitched a little thinking about all the time I had put into the project.
So, what did I think about the whole thing?
Here’s my conclusion:
I think metadata is great. I had a lot of fun creating it; but nobody cares what it is or gives it much thought unless they need to. Is it a waste of time to try and make metadata an immersive experience? Not at all! It’s another layer to plunge into that lake of knowledge and fun. Am I mad about taking my time to create an experience? Never. I think, given time, metadata can become a looked for experience. Even if right now it’s just boring data. Maybe, one day, if a designer has fun with their metadata and catches the attention of some random influencer it could go “viral” and become something big that others incorporate more into their designs. What, I think, would really make it work is if the audience didn’t have to dig for it, there isn’t a search or hunt to find a “secret treasure.” If it could show up along side other information, bringing it to the front instead of hiding in the back, maybe it could be worth the effort. Something that I’ll definitely keep in mind when I design future projects.
Shelly Gardner is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, studying Interaction & Design. The following article relates to the Audiobook project in the DGM 2260 course and representative of the skills learned.
