Some of you might be wondering what metadata is. The quick and glib answer is data about data. In his keynote address to the institute on Managing Metadata for the Digital Library, Clifford Lynch, Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) described metadata using an almost poetic image as “a cloud of collateral information around a data object . . . [and] a tool to accomplish various processes.”

You employ some of those processes every time you use your debit card to pay for an item, or anytime you withdraw cash from an ATM machine. The numerical data on your card that matches the data the ATM machine has stored in its memory banks authorizes it to give the bearer of the card the money he or she has requested. This simple form of identification and authentication is repeated countless times in the course of the working day in many different forms. All of the collateral information that you supply through PIN numbers and passwords enables digitized processes to be performed in your behalf. It is the metadata, in short, that declares that you are you.   

Lynch’s metaphorical definition of metadata may be extended to the interpersonal realm. All of the information that your friends, family, and loved ones associate with you, the sights, smells, body language, and behaviors that constitute who you are and make you special to them and to others constitute the metadata of your personal existence. The metadata that one individual associates with another engenders such complex behaviors as love, trust, hatred, or betrayal–even murder.

On one level, Metadata Murders is a saga about those behaviors. On another, it is about the destruction and reestablishment of the metadata that fosters their creation.  It also is about redemption, self-sacrifice, and all that defines what it means to be human.