Rewriting History: What’s In A Name?

In this article, image metadata and keywording specialist Liisa Kaakinen discusses how contemporary ideas of political correctness are forcing some historical archives to revise their metadata to provide more palatable terms for their media assets.

“…I looked over the shoulder of one of the keyworders and asked her what she was doing. She said that she was PC’ing the keywords. I asked her what that meant and she said that some of these old images have captions and words that we can’t use, such as the N word, so I’m re-keywording them. I told her that you are re-writing the past and she just looked straight through me, with the look of someone who has been keywording continuously for hours on end.” [Read More]

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