V7: Backfilling metadata
Six thousand tweets. Ten months. One taxonomy.
Last week? Not my favorite week. My dog injured her leg while playing with other dogs in the park. My basement needed some emergency masonry work. My acid reflux graduated from intermittent warning shots to full-on assault. But somehow, in the midst of all this, I managed to finish up a project I’ve been chipping away at for countless hours over the past 10 months: manually adding metadata to the nearly 6,000 old tweets I’ve republished on my site.
The tweets have been on the site since my redesign launched last September, but any metadata beyond what was provided by Twitter’s data export wasn’t originally part of the republishing plan, since adding it was obviously going to be an enormous hassle. After the launch, however, it really bugged me that my blog’s numbers didn’t tell the whole story. For each topic, creator, and location listed, there was an untold number of relevant posts left uncounted.
So I started counting them. One tweet at a time, looking for anything taggable within my existing taxonomy. Any of my limited set of topics relevant to the tweet, tagged. If I tweeted about a place, the location was tagged. If I quoted or otherwise mentioned a song or movie, the musician or filmmaker was tagged. If I linked to an article, the author was tagged. (It’s worth noting that of those links, the New York Times deserves credit for being the only mainstream site to almost completely avoid link rot, and for most of the rest of the author names, the Internet Archive was reliably miraculous.) I also took the opportunity to stitch together many series of tweets that would have already been threaded if they hadn’t predated Twitter’s threading capabilities.
For me, this much fuller accounting of the site’s contents validates this laborious cataloging endeavor, especially for the 1,100 creators who were previously untagged. Seeing the updated topics numbers all together provides a decent hierarchy of my public preoccupations, and apparently I spent enough time tweeting about my dreams to allow pretty much anyone to cobble together a workable psychological profile. Perhaps most importantly of all, Dick Clair and Jenna McMahon, the creators of the 1980s sitcom The Facts of Life, have finally received their flowers.