Abstract Several industry‐specific metadata initiatives have historically facilitated structured data modeling for the web in domains such as commerce, publishing, social media, and so forth. The metadata vocabularies produced by these initiatives allow developers to “wrap” information on the web to provide machine‐readable signals for search engines, advertisers, and user‐facing content on apps and websites, thus assisting with surfacing facts about people, places, and products. A universal iteration of such a project called Schema.org started in 2011, resulting from a partnership between Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex to collaborate on a single structured data model across domains. Yet, few studies have explored the metadata vocabulary terms in this significant web resource. What terms are included, upon what subject domains do they focus, and how does Schema.org represent knowledge in its conceptual model? This article presents findings from our extraction and analysis of the documented release history and complete hierarchy on Schema.org 's developer pages. We provide a semantic network visualization of Schema.org , including an analysis of its modularity and domains, and discuss its global significance concerning fact‐checking and COVID‐19. We end by theorizing Schema.org as a gatekeeper of data on the web that authors vocabulary that everyday web users encounter in their searches.

Abstract A second presidential social media transition in the United States occurred as Joe Biden took office on January 20, 2021. In the years since Barack Obama pioneered the use of platforms like Facebook and Twitter while President, Donald Trump shaped his Presidency around the use of Twitter, primarily through a personal account created before entering politics. In this paper, we examine Donald Trump's use of Twitter during his presidency as a lens through which to understand the ongoing archival preservation and data management challenges posed by social media platforms. The blurred lines between public and private records, deleting tweets, and the preservation issues that appeared after his suspension from Twitter and other platforms following the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol all highlight an urgent, ongoing need by archivists, digital preservationists, and information scholars to consider how we might collect and manage social media records in an ever‐changing information landscape. This paper draws primarily on publicly available information from existing preservation initiatives to analyze the state of digital preservation for presidential records. Our findings highlight how both public and private entities manage and provide access to Donald Trump's tweets, pointing to broader implications for social media data preservation.

Abstract Emulation practices are computational, technical processes that allow for one system to reproduce the functions and results of another. This article reports on findings from research following three small teams of information professionals as they implemented emulation practices into their digital preservation programs at a technology museum, a university research library, and a university research archive and technology lab. Results suggest that the distributed teams in this cohort of preservationists have developed different emulation practices for particular kinds of “emulation encounters” in supporting different types of access. I discuss the implications of these findings for digital preservation research and emulation initiatives providing access to software or software‐dependent objects, showing how implications of these findings have significance for those developing software preservation workflows and building emulation capacities. These findings suggest that different emulation practices for preservation, research access, and exhibition undertaken in libraries, archives, and museums result in different forms of access to preserved software—accessing information and experiential access. In examining particular types of access, this research calls into question software emulation as a single, static preservation strategy for information institutions and challenges researchers to examine new forms of access and descriptive representation emerging from these digital preservation strategies.

Abstract Recent events reveal the potential for information technologies to threaten democratic participation and destabilize knowledge institutions. These are core concerns for researchers working within the area of critical information studies—yet these companies have also demonstrated novel tactics for obscuring their operations, reducing the ability of scholars to speak about how harms are perpetuated or to link them to larger systems. While scholars' methods and ethical conventions have historically privileged the agency of research participants, the current landscape suggests the value of exploring methods that would reveal actions that are purposefully hidden. We propose investigation as a model for critical information studies and review the methods and epistemological conventions of investigative journalists as a provocative example, noting that their orientation toward those in power enables them to discuss societal harms in ways that academic researchers often cannot. We conclude by discussing key topics, such as process accountability and institutional norms, that should feature in discussions of how academic researchers might position investigation in relation to their own work.

The information sciences have traditionally been at the center of metadata‐focused research. The US National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence documents revealed by Edward Snowden in June of 2013 brought the term “metadata” into the public consciousness. Surprisingly little discussion in the information sciences has since occurred on the nature and importance of metadata within networked communication systems. The collection of digital metadata impacts the ways that people experience social and technical communication. Without such metadata, networked communication cannot exist. The NSA leaks, and numerous recent hacks of corporate and government communications, point to metadata as objects of new scholarly inquiry. If we are to engage in meaningful discussions about our digital traces, or make informed decisions about new policies and technologies, it is essential to develop theoretical and empirical frameworks that account for digital metadata. This opinion paper presents 5 key sociotechnical characteristics of metadata within digital networks that would benefit from stronger engagement by the information sciences.

In this paper we describe the creation and use of metadata on the early Arpanet as part of normal network function. By using the Arpanet Host‐Host Protocol and its sockets as an entry point for studying the generation of metadata, we show that the development and function of key Arpanet infrastructure can be studied by examining the creation and stabilization of metadata. More specifically, we use the Host‐Host Protocol's sockets as an example of something that, at the level of the network, functions as both network infrastructure and metadata simultaneously. By presenting the function of sockets in tandem with an overview of the Host‐Host Protocol, we argue for the further integrated study of infrastructure and metadata. Finally, we reintroduce the concept of infradata to refer specifically to data that locate data throughout an infrastructure and are required by the infrastructure to function, separating them from established and stabilized standards. We argue for the future application of infradata as a concept for the study of histories and political economies of networks, bridging the largely library and information science (LIS) study of metadata with the largely science and technology studies (STS) domain of infrastructure.