I touched on this with a previous zombie pictures post. Essentially, metadata is awesome because it lets people find your stuff and it helps your stuff find its audience. Metadata is also absent more often than not because people don’t like to type in lots of tags and they especially don’t like to do it on phones.
You see elements of this metadata addition becoming automatic- simple things like Instagram (or maybe IFTT) auto-tagging my images with instagram and (in my case) iPhone (like the image above). I’ve also seen auto-tagging of image filters and with exif data you get all sorts of interesting automated metadata details but they tend to be mechanical rather than social. IFTT, FeedWordPress, and others allow you to do some low level of automatic metadata association.
What keeps coming back to me is that it would be relatively simple to enable people to associate calendars and specific calendar events with online media publishing workflows. This would add the socially relevant automated metadata so the audience could find the media. The end goal being audience rather than metadata.). This would work particularly well at institutions which have centralized calendars or in the case of Udell’s Elm City aggregated calendars. Take VCU’s calendar of events as an example. It has time, location, and categorical elements already. You could add elements to the event template or just leave it as is.
Sequentially, you’d pre-associate your calendar(s) with your media account of choice. You’d upload a piece of media. The system would look at the time stamp and/or GPS data from the media and attempt to connect that information to your calendar(s). Those calendar events would have associated metadata elements which you could opt to associate with your media.
It seems like you then use calendars as indices to media elements which would be an interesting reverse exploration. While it wouldn’t be as automated it would also seem relatively simple to add a WordPress plugin that ties into your calendar and allows you to associate blog posts with calendar events for much the same purpose. It’s a little more manual given blog posts aren’t as synchronous in most cases but it still seems valuable.
As an aside, there’s not much difference between a calendar item and a syllabus assignment. It seems like you could associate metadata with syllabus assignments in a similar way and then intentionally map relationships between assignments to get interdisciplinary connections.