From A to A: Keywords of Markup

Afterword <meta>: Casuistic Code

tags can be found in the head of a document.An early application of was the http-equiv=“refresh” attribute, a way to instruct the browser to reset the Web page after a designated period of time. In addition to refreshing the page, Web writers could designate another URL as the destination point after the refresh, and thus cause the Web page to automatically change URLs. ’s best-known use is providing keywords, descriptions, and other metadata to search engines that used the content of the tags to build their indexes. However, this use is all but forgotten as search engines have turned to other means to build their indexes. Google, in particular , does not rely on tags for fear of being manipulated, as director of research Monika Henzinger has stated. The move away from meta-based search is a response to spammers and “search engine optimization” consultants abusing the tag, a practice known as keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing inserted irrelevant information into tags in order to bias search engine results. Recently, a common distinction between data and metadata—the former primary and visible , the latter ancillary and invisible—has blurred, as folksonomies, tagging, and other practices that revolve around user-created metadata have become popular. has declined, then, not because metadata is less important than it used to be, but because its flexibility allows for new types of usages. Code is the only language that is executable, meaning that it is the first discourse that is materially affective. alexander galloway, protocol At first glance, it was a killing machine. Not that I’ve seen that many. Like so many of the exhibits at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, knowledge and the everyday artifact re-presents an abject form of information lurking in the pins and punch cards that recorded details 2 2 8 • Afterword C A S U I S T I C C O D E Cynthia Haynes about everyday people. This particular machine was manufactured by the Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft (Dehomag), a subsidiary of IBM. According to Edwin Black, thousands of these machines were situated in various camps during World War II in the camp’s Labor Service Office, what prisoners at Bergen-Belsen called “the lion’s den” (IBM 20). Hole punch categories on Hollerith cards detailed “nationality, date of birth, marital status, number of children, reason for incarceration, physical characteristics, and work skills. Sixteen coded categories of prisoners were listed in columns 3 and 4, depending upon the hole position: hole 3 signi fied homosexual, hole 9 for antisocial, hole 12 for Gypsy. Hole 8 designated a Jew” (21). Eventually, Black maintains, “the infamous Auschwitz tattoo began as an IBM number” (“At Death’s Door”). This is code for casuistry of the worst kind. We know from Kenneth Burke that abstract principles applied to specific cases can sometimes lead to justifications for refining the principles themselves. Thus, Burke warned that “the process of casuistic stretching must itself be subjected continually to conscious attention. Its own resources . . . must be transcended by the explicit conversion of a method into a methodology” (232). The difference is that “casuistry as a method” is “the concealing of a A F T E R W O R D • 2 2 9 Figure A.1. Hollerith tabulation machine from IBM (USHMM #N00013). Courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. strategy,” while “casuistry as a methodology” is “a description of a strategy ” (232). That said, before that day, I had generated a remixed tag cloud of this collection’s chapter headings as a means of casuistic invention for an afterword. Each author, it seemed, had stretched the casuistic tale of their markup tag, beginning with Rice and Dilger’s reminder that to explore keywords is somewhat of a dance with the devil, so to speak, during which the faint strains of the more nefarious practices of markup may be heard. In that spirit, and being attuned to their call, you can imagine the tag cloud building in my head as I stood in front of this machine. What I am about to stretch is the casuistic code of hole 8. What I hope to avoid is the refinement of a principle, which is itself a refined way of saying that at all costs one should avoid the twisted logic that uninstalls the ethics of technology and information control...