In this week’s class we learned all about metadata; what it is, what it does, and how it ultimately contributes to the digital English world. Being an English major, I was initally baffled when first reading about data, as I was not aware how crucial data is or how often digital authors actually utilize it. Never in a million years did I suspect that I, myself, would be working with data, that’s only for computer science majors or engineers right? False. After actively engaging with the reading topics, and seeing how they affect our blogs and individual posts, I have become more encouraged and found that learning about metadata was genuniely interesting. First we have our basic hard, cold data, which as Dr.Pilsch says is “the raw bits of facts and figures from which information is derived.” Scalar and compound data are sublayers that make up the different types of data, while metadata is “data about data.” Once again, while learning about metadata, I was astonished for the fiftieth time in discovering that we as people interact with metadata in our everyday lives, as well as how comprehensive data is. Being slightly honest, learning about metadata was slightly difficult to wrap my brain around (which is just my poetic brain having to process all this ‘data’very slowly), but not as difficult as the markup activity last week. Metadata is what keeps everything in digital writing or an online site organized; there is a difference in the way that metadata is utilized and received in both Jekyll and HTML. In Jekyll, if metadata is not included in a file, the resulting presentation of information given will not appear as changed. Metadata in Jekyll allows acess to HTML is a different story from Jekyll; HTML is able to recongize or receive metadata based on the amount of tags that notify HTML of metadata. Without metadata, none of the data that we deal with in everyday life would be structured; the pieces of information that a user needed, would not be found so easily, rather the pieces of data displayed would be all over the place.