Synthesis

by Jentery, Curtis, Matthew & Jamie

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In this layer, the work previously generated in the “Analysis” stage is enlisted in an attempt to define the work of “Standards in the Making” (SITM) in practice. Here, each author synthesizes the insights of the group in order to pursue of a particular understanding of this practice, proposing along the way an account of the overlaps and divergences generated in our analysis of the Flickr Commons while highlighting different questions or issues within them. What emerges are four individual attempts to describe the potential ramifications of an SITM approach – its foundational commitments, its assumptions and its utility in various situations of critique, research, and composition.

Though they are, once again, individually composed, these entries are motivated by the same series of nested questions: What are the affordances and constraints of an SITM approach to research and writing? How does it characterize as the “work” of metadata categories and standards? What does it mean to practice SITM as critical inquiry and what are its intellectual commitments? What critical questions and theoretical frameworks are vital to this practice? And in what ways does this practice draw on and speak back to the investments of the particular fields represented in this piece? Our answers to these questions are multiple, and have their own investments as well. In this space, common interests and insights are noted and theorized. Explicit challenges are raised. So, like the previous layer, reading across these entries exposes important points of connection and discontinuity which speak more generally to the issues involved in practicing SITM.

Entries in the Synthesis Layer: Contingent Narrations of Standards in Flight, Metadata: Affordances and Constraints, Volume. Networks. Distance., Metadata Across the Curriculum: Teaching Standards