Performative Metadata: Reliability Frameworks and Accounting Frameworks in Content Aggregation Data Models

Metadata is not a new concept: it has existed for hundreds of years, with different forms and functions. In contemporary settings, we think about metadata serving administrative, descriptive, and technical functions. These roles are often in the service of common goals to identify information so that it can be found and used according to the discipline or industry from which it comes. But as modes of accessing and using information change, so too does the role of the data about that data, the metadata. Even if the metadata itself does not change, it comes to serve new functions, and these functions merit additional study. In this paper, we argue that in the contemporary political landscape of information, metadata schemas stemming from distinct ontological approaches take on fundamentally performative roles, and different underlying approaches mean that the performativity of the metadata is also enacted differently.