Don’t Make Me Metadata. All I Want Is Text.

Thinking about the future of text, I often think about communication on the Web. And about the metacommunication that happens in-between its lines of human and machine-readable code. And about the delayed action which any written medium, the Web’s hypertext even more so, breeds.

And while thinking about text on the Web I always end up switching codes, thinking about metadata and its communicative power.

In the current state of writing and reading tools, metadata is somewhat excluded from the hermeneutic circle. It is considered something separate from the immediate exchange.

But what if metadata is also the message? What if I could use metadata to exchange with fellow intertextual animals?

Imagine a world where text ideation, creation and reuse are tightly woven with a knowledge graph, its objects and most importantly the metadata it is built of. It is in that world where we writers would be able to just write, and they, systems turn words into tags, rather Linked Data, enriching our communication practices and adding dimensions to them through metadata linking words to concepts and their properties.

We then can stop conceiving of text as a separate object, meant to be annotated and start seeing creating and managing text (or what marketing communication practices often refer to as “content”) from the perspective of knowledge management, graph enrichment and Linked Data publishing.

We will no longer think about a text without thinking about its concepts and the systems it will appear in to enter the mind of the reader. We will add the abstraction layer to the creative thinking process from the beginning, knowing that the metadata we use for our text are as important a communication and expression vehicle as the text itself. We will look at metadata as our reader’s orientation trail marks, signs on their hermeneutic path of searching a way through what I have to communicate and what they need. 

Our texts on the Web become multilayered, living on interconnected, multimodal pages.

Thus points of meaning co-creation will mushroom across different levels opening portals for the future of text.