Metadata Tagging Guide

For ease of use, please use the following coding-syntax after the “Bibliography” section of each wiki page, where “content” becomes your tags (note: commas between tags are auto-generated, so there's no need to include them in the code).

[We need help uploading our code here]

<wiki co>

Please metadata tag each entry in the following order:

Contributors include authors, translators, performers, and other people involved in the creation of the piece. Contributor tags should follow this syntax: first name-last name-role (e.g., Kenneth-Sherwood-translator). If the author is unknown, the entry should be “unknown-author”. If other contributors are unknown, omit the tags. For corporate authors or pieces attributed to a particular cultural group, the name of the group shall be used without any roles (e.g., Ojibwe). Roles are omitted because Reference to the people can also serve as language and cultural origin. For multiple contributors, make a separate tag entry in the following order: author, translator, performer and other contributors as needed (e.g., Joan-Smith-author Kenneth-Sherwood-translator).

Date of recording, creation, or publication if known. So far, we are only including the dating provided by Alcheringa. It is possible that further research could locate missing dates but most of the oral poetry (usually composed by corporate tribal authors), at least, will be difficult to trace to a specific date. We are also currently listing dates in the form of a single digit year (e.g., 1991) but decades or centuries might be a useful future addition. In the case where Alcheringa provides two dates, we have chosen to use the one that the Alcheringa text is based off of (e.g., “Song of the Talking God” was transposed for Alcheringa in 1950 but originally recorded in 1929, so we used the 1950 date).

Language would refer to the source language of the piece, including dialect. If the source language is unknown, omit the tag. If the piece is originally written in English, English should be used as the language tag. If the language tag is the same as the corporate author, omit the language tag.

This refers to the cultural affiliation of the author (e.g., Navajo). In cases where there is a general or umbrella group and a smaller group, they should be in separate tags and ordered from broadest to narrowest (e.g., Native-American Navajo). If there is more than one cultural tag, they should be in alphabetical order (e.g., Iroquois Navajo Ojibwe). If the cultural tag is the same as a corporate author or a language tag, it should be omitted.

Place refers to the location where the pieces came from. As it stands, places are nested from largest to smallest as follows: continent or region of continent if relevant, and country or country region if relevant (e.g., North-America Northwest-USA). For brevity, we are stopping at the level of a country’s region, however, if a piece calls for a more specific geographical tag as in the level of a state or city, it can be added as a special case. However, wiki contributors should use discretion to avoid making the tags list unnecessarily specific. If a piece originates from a place that no longer exists, that place name should be included followed by the contemporary place name (e.g., Southern-Africa Rhodesia Zimbabwe).

Genre in this case refers to the self-identified label as stated in the issue of Alcheringa Tags should be specific enough to be useful (e.g., narrative-poem is better than just poem). In case that a piece falls under more than one genre, include both tags as separate entries (e.g., narrative-poem song).

This tag identifies the modalities of each text. Because all of the texts in Alcheringa exist as print documents (even those that have been transcribed or transposed from oral recordings), we found it unnecessary to include “print” as a modality. The three types of modalities that we found useful so far are “oral”, “audio”, and “visual”. The “oral” tag includes all texts which began or were reproduced as oral compositions. The “audio” tag is for texts that include an audio version (mp3, etc.) on the wiki. And the “visual” tag is for all texts that include a visual component.

Topics (or the keywords that describe those topics) will be under its own heading titled “Topics”. We decided that this separation is very useful in making the metadata tags appear more organized and allowing this list of topics or keywords to keep growing as more useful tagging connections are found between texts. Please list all topics tags in alphabetical order. Think about including tags like “nature”, “fire”, “hunting”, “marriage”, “animal”, “wolf” that draw out larger topical connections between texts and also more narrow ones.