Apropos our reading of Weinberger's
Everything Is Miscellaneous, you might enjoy reading today's
New York Times story about archiving baseball by deploying an army of people to watch games and tag each play.
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| Portrait of June Christy and Pete Rugolo, June 1947 or 1948. |
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But, channeling Weinberger, why only 50 loggers? Why not crowd-source the affair? Let anyone watching the games or clips tag video however they see fit? One possibility is that MLB still appears to maintain control over the vocabulary, and wouldn't appreciate some tags that shed light on the archive. Thus, while "animal" is an MLB-sanctioned tag for a play where a squirrel interferes with play, MLB might not want users to tag all of Alex Rodriguez's plays with "steroids" or Roger Clemens' plays with "perjury." In other words (and getting back to McKemmish's article from week 2), what gets included is a value judgment, and archives reflect/perpetuate power structures.
