First metadata table


Table of Contents

First metadata table
2017.Feb.05, 09:00 pm
2017.Feb.06, 1:20 pm
Name: Sohini Chattopadhyay
Date and Time:

2017.Feb.05, 09:00 pm

Location: 112th Street, NY 10025
Subject: Reading the folios

On 5th February, I read the folios. As this was my first formal exposure to the manuscript, I was reading it to know more about the contents. Each recipes were not long, some were related to earlier folios which were perhaps not in my assigned section.
In class, we had decided to read our assigned folios and make a metadata table with some of the contents. This descriptive medatada table will become the core data of what we want to represent in the digital edition of the annotated volumes. We chose to use the folio translations available in the Github instead of the pdf copy.
The categories to be included were the identifier, heading, image url, folio start and end, activity, ingredients, number of ingredients, link to the annotations, names of places, persons and any foreign language.
Queries after reading – there are many recipes that refer to some other recipes. Can we link them together so that the reader can branch out from one concept? Reading the recipe book as a narrative is different from reading with the objective of finding linkages and comprehensible keywords. I kept on returning to different folios to see the differences or similarities.


Name: Sohini Chattopadhyay
Date and Time:

2017.Feb.06, 1:20 pm

Location: Butler Library
Subject: Extracting keywords

While each recipe are not long and reading them did not take more than an hour and a half, sorting them into categories was a more time consuming process. I started this process on 6th February.
Some aspects were easy to put into the metadata table because they were mechanical tasks of copying from the github to the spreadsheet. These included the identifiers and the headings. I coped them verbatim.
The problems arose with the analytical aspects. I was not sure what would be considered an ingredient – whether anything that is used in the recipe but does not remain in the end product, like water or heat, be considered an ingredient? I noted them as ingredients in spite of the confusion. I also debated how to categorize the activities. Some like making were recurrent themes, but there were several types of making. I chose to categorize them according to hierarchies. So I wrote <making; perfume making> and so on.
Some spellings were not consistent. for example: moulding and molding. I kept them unaltered but raised a query on the issue tracker. I was also not sure about how to accommodate marginalia in the entries. They held important information pertaining to the recipe, but did not have specific identifiers so that we could put on the metadata table. The issue tracker suggests that it is a shared problem.
The creation of the metadata table essentially allows us to use controlled vocabularies or keywords to conceptually retrieve materials. Therefore, as we had discussed through our user stories, the metadata input had to be both conceptually clear to us and our potential readers. This raised questions of how specific we would want to be with keywords, and how granular our information would be on the metadata table. It also required the use of a ‘preferred term’ on common consensus else it would be impossible to classify similar items.


ASPECTS TO KEEP IN MIND WHEN MAKING FIELD NOTES