Performance: Paralinguistic Cues, Metadata, and Identity

The ways in which the metadata for Johnston’s and Anonymous’ narratives differ from the others is also suggestive. The other five narratives provide the authors' full names, topical titles, and submission dates, but no other information. Anonymous' metadata excludes her name, which seems in keeping with the distance she maintains from the camera. Withholding her name in the metadata functions the same way as withholding her face in the video: she declines to fully identify herself in, or with, her narrative.

Johnston's metadata is striking for the opposite reason: unlike the other narrators, she answers some of the demographic questions asked by the DALN's accession questionnaire. In response to open-ended questions about race/ethnicity and class, Johnston identifies herself as "african american" and "lower middle class." It is important to note here that the DALN’s accession questionnaire is a folksonomy. It does not ask users to choose from a controlled vocabulary, but phrases demographic questions as follows:

• Do you want to self-identify with regard to race or ethnicity? (This information will help other DALN users find stories by the race/ethnicity of their authors.)
• Do you want to self-identify with regard to your class background (ex.: working class, middle class, wealthy)? (This information will help other DALN users find stories by the race/ethnicity of their authors.) ("About Your Literacy Narrative")

The demographic questions' “fill-in-the blank” structure reflects the DALN creators’ interest in how (and whether) people identify and define themselves when given the freedom to do so. In light of the open-endedness of the DALN’s metadata questions, Johnston's choice to answer these questions at all and to answer them the way she does may have to do with her own identity-related commitments, or it may have to do with the way the accession questions are presented. As indicated above, the DALN accession questionnaire explains that including demographic information offers users the option to group related narratives together in order to look at them according to different lenses such as race, gender, class, and topic ("About Your Literacy Narrative"). Within this context, for instance, Johnston's selective inclusion of specific identity categories in her narrative's metadata may suggest that she sees her technology identity as affected by her racial and class identity and wants her story viewed alongside narratives by other African Americans and/or members of the lower middle class. Attending to potentially strategic uses of DALN metadata like Johnston’s offers a way to link individual narratives to their wider context based on explicit—in addition to implicit—connections between these personal stories and social, cultural, and economic conditions.