That would imply that the very concept of words, and hence spaces, definitely falls in the realm of metadata.

The clear implication is that there is a rather larger “comprehension buffer” in the brain than we are used to considering, and that meaning and structure are derived/comprehended/imposed in a far more active and contextually integrated form than we naively assume. To continue with the E.W. example, the extension of the point is that with practice and trust in our background sorting and meaning-assignment capacities it is possible to scan pages “slashing” diagonally across chunks of paragraphs, whole paragraphs, or even pages and yet perceive and absorb what is written. And then the demonstration concludes with a some “speed-reading” of poetry — which turns out to be reading aloud, with feeling. There is SO much of the weight of communication borne in poetry by the cadences, rhymes, and patterned reflections of image that it would be almost pointless to try and “grok at a glance”. ;)

So spaces HELP with perception of content. Metadata organizes semantically. Perhaps you could expand your argument to encompass capitalization conventions, many of which r txtg yth r gvg up ttlly. No space at the inn on a tiny cell phone screen for all the convenient clues that foolscap, whether material or electronic, allows.

Speaking of conventions, agreed-upon spelling and syntax have much to do with comprehension, too; having spent years editing articles written for the Web, I know that many disdain (in error, IMNSHO) to follow them. Pointing out errors and typos in, e.g. comments sections like this (“well night unto impossible” s/b “well-nigh impossible”; “pauses are genrally there” s/b “pauses are generally there”; “imminent doom. . .” s/b “imminent doom …”) get one excoriated as a “spelling-and-grammar Nazi!”. Speed of comprehension, though, has a lot to do with such pickiness; decoding misspells and malaprops takes time and effort and is distracting.

So are formalisms and formatting metadata? Is it simply a matter of preference about whether the definition should be stretched to include them? Or is there something more important at stake? Maybe there’s a special category of metadata which relates specifically to internal consistency and comprehensibility, but is otherwise “neutral”.

A word by itself has meaning–the dictionary attests to that. But words as data–depends on the context. The title of your book consists of words, and they form data. The metadata is ‘title’ or even ‘book title’. This may seem an uptight statement to make to some, or overly simplistic to others, but it’s a very tangible example of data and metadata, as well as words as ‘data’.

But red

Yellow apple rain not not worm peach. Brick fog chip!

Very real words. Each has meaning. In this context and how they’re used? Worthless. So are they data? Only to the person who really does count the cracks in the sidewalk.

Returning to the space. I know that in your book, David, you used space to represent how even absence can be metadata, and used spaces between words as example. But spaces are not ‘nothing’, nor are they an absence of something. They are actual characters, they have their own key on the keyboard, their own width based on font, they take up real estate on a page. They don’t have a visible presence, but they ’something’.

Now, are the metadata? Not really. They are a syntactic element, just like the alphabet that is used to form what can end up being data or even metadata. But they don’t really describe anything, no more than the letter ‘b’ describes anything. Well, unless we’re watching Sesame Street.

Even if they were, they’re not inherently a part of a word — they’re a part of the sentence, phrase, term, what have you. A word can be terminated with any number of characters, or even nothing at all. It’s not dependent on a space for its termination. It’s the sentence, phrase, or term that is counting on its existence.

Thisisaperfectlygooduseofwordsbutnotagreatsentence.

This/is/a/perfectly/good/use/of/words/but/not/a/great/sentence.

Now, when is the absence of something ‘metadata’? “When’s the wedding?” “Oh, we haven’t set the date yet.”

But then, I’m an uptight Semantic Web nerd ;-)

Also note that a speaker’s pauses get more distinct when they assume the listener is less fluent, and that pauses are less necessary when vocabulary is constrained (so that words are more easily distinguished as unique utterances).

This is far from a hard-and-fast rule, just a tendency, and there are other forms of redundancy like the use of ‘a’ vs. ‘an’ or even regional dialects (both pronunciation and idiom) that reduce the need for pauses in many cases, but of course printed word boundaries for a given language are less susceptible to variation (precisely in order to make them more comprehensible across time and space in the same way that more distinct pauses do).

David, on top of the foregoing, pauses and stress can of course also convey metadata (the pregnant pause, sarcasm, the stress conveying a double meaning, the change in tone indicating a digression), but note that these are generally conveyed in print in other ways, if at all.

In those cases (commas, parentheses, the ellipsis) and others, we usually *are* talking about metadata (because it adds to the literal meaning of the words), but a literal interpretation of the lowly space in-and-of-itself is just that it’s a simple delimiter and a data format detail (and, if I recall correctly, bullets were tried first).

It is interesting to note that the affordances of the textual equivalent may not match those of the spoken utterance (this is, in part, why you don’t usually notice the micro pauses consciously). For example, few people can manage to convey by tone alone more than one level of digression, whereas nested parenthetical remarks run rampant in print. This is also why we need commas to indicate deliberate, meaningful pauses, rather than relying on double or triple spaces in print (which is the ‘obvious’ solution).

Yes, but that’s not a property of the words as much as it’s a property of we humans always having or creating a sense of persistent context for words.

(Or, we’re not recognizing the characters as words, and just talking about the characters as information.)

For example, someone hands you a piece of paper with three letters: “die.” That’s already a bit of a context. If you’re playing a German word game, “die” is the definite article (“the” in English). If you’re a character in horror movie in English, it brings bad tidings of you imminent doom. . .

So, until writing all of that, I felt like there was no similarly persistent context / contextualizing in which we recognize words as data. I was just thinking there are specific contexts (of which, of course, there could be many). For example, “die,” which represents a number of points in Scrabble, is data in the context of Scrabble scoring.

But, now I see that there is at least one persistent context / contextualizing in which we recognize words as data: the “word count” context. For example, this is turning into a really long comment, which means it has a lot or words: the individual words are the data of this word count context.

To get the spaces = metadata, in this context, I’d suggest that a word count includes a list of characters that act as delimiters or non-word characters. That items in that list, including the space character, are data: it’s not the word data, but it’s a constraint on the word data, and therefore, in this context, it could rightly be called metadata.

Michael, I take the stress changes and pauses as metadata that give us important information about the data (the words).

Running the written text together loses that, making it more difficult (though not impossible) to decode the text back into words.

So, while the spaces are data, it is just redundant data, like a checksum. With them, decoding the text stream back into words is unambiguous.

No one thinks of checksums as metadata, it is just a feature of a data *format*, and of no more semantic significance than that.