Data Dictionary
Valeria Luiselli's Tell Me How It Ends shaped the way I thought about metadata when it comes to this project. In the immigration questionnaire she describes, an answer counts as "correct" when it fits a pre-existing legal category, not when it captures what happened to a child. Similarly, the metadata for a poster can have information such as the title, artist, and date, and still say nothing about its intentions or what it reveals. Therefore, I decided to not treat metadata just as a place to record these basic facts, but as a place that could make a poster's persuasive choices visible.
What the Poster Promises and Imagined Tourist describe the ideal or fantasy each poster is selling, as well as the audience it imagines. What Is Visible describes what is actually in the image, such as its landscape, transportation, people, symbols. I decided to include this because I feel like it is important to understand and be specific about what is there before arguing about what is missing.
Commissioning Organization asks who created the poster and wanted to represent California this way. I was inspired by Michelle Caswell, who traces the Tuol Sleng mug shots back to a nineteenth-century police classification system, showing that a record's institutional origin is what the record was built to do.
Destination looks purely descriptive, but isn't. After reading Gilliland’s writing, I understood that an imposed English name for a place is itself a choice, and it isn’t just a neutral label. This is why, for example, the Catalina poster's destination reads "Pimu (Catalina Island)".
Paired Item(s) is the main field that carries my argument. Neither the LAPL collections nor the Library of Congress connects a poster to other material that challenges it. In my archive, every poster is linked to at least one source that complicates it, and two other fields called What It Reveals and Category of Exclusion Addressed name exactly what the paired material highlights.
Whose Perspective Is Centered notes whose point of view a source comes from. For example, Edward Curtis's photograph shows that Tongva people lived on Catalina long before tourism, but Curtis himself was not Tongva. This field accounts for any bias that may exist in a contextual item.