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When you manage millions of digital assets, as the BBC does, you need robust metadata practices to organize and discover them.
Vera Brozzoni is a metadata manager at the BBC who focuses on classical music. She combines here academic background in music, philosophy, and the humanities with a rigorous metadata mind to help BBC systems – and ultimately viewers and listeners – discover and appreciate the music she loves so much.
We talked about:
- her work as a metadata manager at the BBC and her distinctive background in classical music and philosophy and the humanities
- how the complex history of music complicates her work
- the role of taxonomy in her work
- the meaning behind the famous quote, “Metadata is a love letter to the future”
- how “music does whatever it wants” just as biological organisms don’t always follow predictable rules
- the importance of not being present-bound and imposing current biases on prior generations of music
- her thoughts on the need for more practitioners with artistic cultural backgrounds to enter the field of metadata management
- the diverse variety of intellectual talent at the BBC
- how she sees her role as “bridging two completely different universes”
- her thoughts on how AI could benefit her metadata work
- her metadata outreach work into the music community
- how to measure the effectiveness of a metadata program
- her belief that the phantom of the French philosopher Blaise Pascal hovers over all cultural metadata work
Vera’s bio
Vera Brozzoni was born in Italy where she studied Philosophy. She then moved to the UK where she studied History of Music and obtained a PhD in Composition at Newcastle University. She has worked in the music industry for many years, specialising in classical music metadata, devising innovative methods of schematising the history of music in all its complexities. Her aim is to evangelise metadata to classical music companies so that they can future-proof data coming from the past. Her other interests include AI, Machine Learning, cinema, literature.
Connect with Vera online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast, episode number 8. Adjacent to the engineering and information practices that build the semantic infrastructure we operate in, is the crucial field of metadata management. Vera Brozzoni agrees with the internet archivist Jason Scott that “metadata is a love letter to the future.” In her work at the BBC, Vera combines her deep academic background in music and the humanities with her metadata expertise to help listeners and viewers discover and appreciate classical music.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number eight of the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show, Vera Brozzoni. Vera is a metadata manager at the BBC and based in the company in the UK. Welcome, Vera. Tell the folks a little bit more about your work at BBC and …
Vera:
Hello Larry. So, yeah, as you rightly introduced me, Larry, I’m a metadata manager. My particularity is that I’m a classical music specialist and I come from a staunchly humanities background and not a tech or library science background like most of my colleagues basically.
Vera:
The fact of being an anomaly in this field, I’m trying to use it for the good of culture, for the good of the arts, and trying to convince the classical music world of the importance of metadata, which is great fun as you can imagine.
Larry:
That’s funny. I hadn’t really thought about that side of it ’cause I’ve thought more like you, we met in London at a semantic event and you fit right in. It’s like you’re clearly not having any trouble integrating into the tech world and the media world, but that’s interesting. Tell me more about getting your classical music colleagues on board with metadata.
Vera:
Well, the reason why I didn’t feel like a fish out of water is because I have a degree in philosophy. Philosophy is not the abstract art of building universes that most people think. Philosophy is a very rigorous science in itself with a very specific jargon. And when I entered the world of metadata, I found out to my own surprise that a large part of that jargon was in common with philosophy. So I felt, “Oh, I actually understand this.” And I didn’t expect it, but I immediately felt, well, this is a way to put my analytical brain at use, not in philosophy, but in the real world, which is what philosophers would have liked anyway.
Vera:
So this was coupled with my passion and my knowledge about classical music, which is something that has accompanied me forever. I actually have a master’s degree and a PhD in music. So yeah, I have my credentials. And I started to work for Universal Music some 10 years ago, and it was immediately clear that I had the right knowledge and the right expertise to make an imprint in the field of classical metadata.
Vera:
Classical music metadata must be said is an incredible mess because the history of music in itself is extremely complex. Musicians and composers have never thought in terms of metadata, like, “Oh, let’s make this title really clear,” or, “Let’s make this data hierarchy very clear so that 300 years down the line, someone will be able to catalog my music very easily.” No, this has never happened.
Larry:
So the whole classical music industry has conspired to make your job as hard as possible.
Vera:
Exactly, yes, and I enjoyed it.
Larry:
Nice. Well, tell me a little bit about that. So I sometimes think of some of my work as archeology, and what you just described is going back into classical, and classical music is probably, at least in terms of the western arts, it’s as deep and established as anything. So there is a tradition there, like an intellectual and some kind of scholarly tradition. But metadata strategy wasn’t part of it. So you’re kind of putting the metadata on after the fact. Is that kind of how it works?
Vera:
Yeah, exactly. I liken it to Charles Darwin or Carlo Linneo (Linnaeus) or the old catalogers of living being, all the taxonomists of the past centuries. And again, I have used the word taxonomy, which is something that we currently use in metadata, but its root is actually in natural sciences.
Vera:
It’s about trying to put a cloak of order onto something that is inherently chaotic. In the well-knowledge that order will never cover the 100% of what you’re trying to do. There will always be something that is irreducible and un-catalog-able if you have this word in English.
Larry:
It’s a word now. If it wasn’t before, I’ll take it.
Vera:
Yeah, exactly. I coined it.
Larry:
No, that’s super interesting, that history and the interplay between disciplines, because I know enough about taxonomy, know that it arises out of Linnaeus’ work in biology and that attempt, and it’s sort of like, so it’s more about, we think of taxonomy as not imposing order on things, but it’s really more about not imposing, but ascribing order, ascribing characteristics to things so that we can organize them better. Is that sort of how you picture taxonomy in your work, is that-
Vera:
I believe there is a sense of hubris, there is a sense of we try to make things easier for ourselves to read. However, it’s not just a matter of us modern people being arrogant and being cultural freaks, let’s say. It’s also a way to make sure that this wealth of knowledge, this wealth of culture and art will be readable in the future. I think you must be familiar with the famous quote, “Metadata is a love letter to the future,” by Jason Scott I think. And I fully believe in that. I am quite an idealist in this sense. I do believe that my work in metadata, no matter how gray or boring it might look to someone who is not in the field, is actually extremely important.
Vera:
Now, the problem with classical music in particular is that it’s a world that it’s firmly steeped in the past and it’s very difficult for them to think about the present, let alone the future. So I feel that very often my work is about bridging these three time dimensions, past, present, and future and try to make people understand, look, what I’m doing here is really, really important because obviously it’s about cataloging, it’s about archiving, it’s about making sure that the people who will come will find a legacy of music that is discoverable.
Larry:
That notion of discoverability, that’s sort of the whole point of, or one of the main points of metadata. I know there’s a lot of other uses for it, but that notion. You mentioned a minute ago, you used the word chaotic I think to describe the heritage that you’re working with. But if you go to the BBC website, it’s anything but chaotic. It looks like, “Oh, this is very tidy and organized,” and that’s just the result of your work. I guess part of your work is too, because you love classical music and you want to portray it accurately. Does anything get lost in the tidying up of things?
Vera:
Well, of course, of course it does. But even when you say that the BBC website is all nice and neat, you don’t see behind the scenes.
Larry:
Okay. Well, I haven’t been invited in yet to look around.
Vera:
But yeah, in the field of music, yes, obviously there are things that don’t follow. Just like in biological evolution, there are species of animals, there are creatures that don’t follow any of the superimposed rules because evolution does whatever it wants. And music does whatever it wants as well, which is why when I was working at Apple Music a few years ago, I made a schema of a completely new type of hierarchy to schematize classical music. Obviously when we talk about a hierarchy, we immediately imagine a series of vertical layers, one under the other, under the other. But what about the side? What about trying to link pieces of music between each other, not as a pyramid going down, but as branches going to the side and in every direction?
Vera:
And it was obviously super, super complex. I called this type of schema “neura” because it reminded me of neural, the neural networks in the brain, which are not schematically going in every possible direction. And yeah, I still believe it would be quite a comprehensive way to schematize the history of music. Obviously, it’s a daunting prospect and it’s something that would, I don’t know, keep me busy three or four lifetimes. And if it’s there a way to, I don’t know, freeze my brain and make it work for 300 years while I schematize music, yeah, I’ll be happy with that.
Larry:
That’s another kind of love letter to the future. But I love that idea of a neural schema for things because I think that’s, I’m aware of this in the taxonomy and ontology work that I do, that there’s a lot of discovery of discovering natural relationships in orders, but there’s still this kind of messiness to it that needs to be accounted for, and like SKOS that tries to do it with term variants and things like that. And that neural schema also reminds me of a knowledge graph that you have nodes and things connecting them.
Larry:
What did that neural, because a schema, and I think for folks who don’t know what a schema is, it’s just a way to describe a body of stuff. It’s like how you understand what you’re looking at. And so that neural model of a schema for classical music, were there clumps of things or was it pretty flat or how did that end up looking?
Vera:
Oh, God. There are obviously nodes that, again, that we have superimposed from a 20th century perspective, 21st now century perspective, what we call baroque music, for example, could be seen as a node in the schema. But if you put yourself in the mind of someone who lived in the 1600, that was their music. It wasn’t baroque music. It was their contemporary music. It was their Taylor Swift and their Ed Sheeran. And even more than that, it was dance music. All these little pieces that we now tend to see as dainty, very gracious, it was the techno music of the 1600s.
Vera:
And I think only if you put yourself in the mind of the people who wrote this music at that time, only then you can really respect this music and understand its real tropes. It obviously means that you educate your brain to jump through epochs. Isn’t it fantastic? Isn’t it fun? It obviously doesn’t come natural, but I believe it’s one of the greatest thing about studying the arts in general.
Vera:
This is not just about music. You can say the same about literature. You can say the same about Shakespeare, which now it’s considered the great classic of English literature, but if you actually read what he wrote, you find it’s about violence, it’s about all sorts of really, really fiery passions.
Larry:
Interesting. So that sort of awareness of the perspective, which is only, I guess the longer the time span and the broader the subject matter, the more kinds of variation like that you’re going to or the more need to account for the context of the situation.
Vera:
Yes.
Larry:
Because I think you’re right. And there’s always this present-minded mindedness or present bias I think that any generation has about its supremacy and history or whatever. And then that just probably gets exacerbated with every generation or every epoch that you mentioned.
Larry:
Yeah. And how do you account for that in metadata management? Are you consciously thinking about exposing the present-minded bias and saying like, “No,” like the way you just described it, I have a much better feel for baroque music now that it’s like, that it was just the contemporary, was music, that was just music and that’s what you listen to, that’s what you dance to, that was on your mind? Are you making an effort to instill that sense of the era in the metadata work that you do?
Vera:
I wish that was the case. My job it’s a bit more rigid than what I myself would like it to be. Essentially in a huge place like the BBC there isn’t much time for philosophy, which I’m really sorry about. It’s more about the accent is on the discoverability. Whether there is scope to put a layer of philosophy of jumping through epochs on it, yes, there is a massive scope with everything that is complex, everything that is artistic, and I think it needs an artistic mind to capture its nature.
Vera:
And that’s where I think it would be really beneficial if there were more people that come from an artistic cultural background in metadata and not just from analysis or library studies because it’s not just about filling the right cells. It’s not just about constructing a mathematical model. It’s about giving a legacy of emotions, giving a sense of what the world has been and what the world can be.
Larry:
That seems really important and maybe lacking. But I guess there’s so much, my mind is kind of reeling right now with first of all, that by your main service with metadata strategy is to make things discoverable. And then I guess it sort of gets into the boundaries between the subject matter expertise around. And like you said, like you just mentioned there’s literature as well as classical music, as well as dozens of other disciplines or subject areas. So there’s that subject matter expertise about that. And then there’s this sort of practice expertise around metadata strategy and taxonomy and similar practices. It’s really …
Larry:
Are there other things at the BBC where they have subject matter experts doing the metadata strategy or is it often a more, like you said, like a generalist, like a librarian or somebody like that doing the organizing?
Vera:
The great thing about working at the BBC is that I found a lot of people have a very varied culture. A colleague of mine has worked for many years as a film editor and she has quite a rich page on IMDB. There are someone who, when we do have social evening after a pint of two, they will start talking about the idea of time, the philosophical concept of time. And this is something that has never happened to me in any other workplace. It seems that the BBC attracts really original ways of thinking.
Vera:
And from this point of view, I think it would be great if all these original brains were put to work not just on the general metadata strategy, but as you were saying on specific fields that they are specialists in. But that would be the ideal world, and we know that. We are quite far from it.
Larry:
Yeah, that’s right. And when you mentioned the context of the BBC, it’s just like, well, that’s a thing to do anything remotely related to the humanities in the context of any kind of business, especially like a giant, what, 200 year old media business or whatever, however old the BBC is.
Vera:
A hundred.
Larry:
Yeah, it’s a hundred. Yeah, that’s right. It’s only as old as I guess radio. I don’t know what the exact heritage is, but like you said, it sounds like the odds are as good there as any place to do some of the more interesting things, to get deep into the subject matter as opposed to just doing a top-level taxonomy exercise on a group of things.
One thing, the scale at the BBC is crazy when you look at the scope of-
Vera:
Huge, yeah, it’s huge.
Larry:
Yeah. And my assumption is that metadata is what makes scale possible. Can you talk about are there issues of operating at a scale like that that enter into your metadata work?
Vera:
No, no. This might be, this must look like a simplistic answer, but the thing is that once you understand the rules, whether you are talking about a small metadata system, which is an impossibility because metadata systems are always huge, yeah, a huge or a gigantic one, I don’t feel the weight of the size.
Larry:
Interesting. So it’s more about the subject matter of the thing.
Vera:
Yes.
Larry:
Yeah. It’s like what …
Vera:
Basically, in my particular case, I think the difficulty is to make people shift their mindsets. As I said, I see my job as a sort of bridging two completely different universes, which are not different at all, but they think they are. And what I am trying to do is to make them understand metadata is not your enemy. Metadata is what you need. Trust me, you’ll be happy with my work. And also to tell the metadata, look, let’s look a bit more in depth about this artistic subject, let’s give it the attention, the joy, the respect it deserves.
Larry:
Right.
Vera:
It’s quite innovative what I’m trying to do, and I hope it will get traction.
Larry:
Yeah. And one thing I’m curious now about the technology underneath all this, that you’ve done all this intellectual work around like and I’ve got a really good feel for how you operate. But I’m curious now about, because we’re talking mostly I guess, is it exclusively, we’re talking about media artifacts, whether it’s like a recording or a composition or whatever the artifact is and attaching the metadata to it and then doing things with it at the BBC. I mean, I know there’s probably a whole lot to it, but what’s the basic technical infrastructure that you ascribe your metadata to and where it’s used in the BBC systems?
Vera:
Well, not just at the BBC, but I think in general what you want is to use the right identifiers. One thing that … You know what ISRCs are? They are identifiers for recordings. Then they are identifiers for musical works. And there is something now called AcoustID, which is basically a fingerprint of the audio wave that a recording makes. This is especially useful because there are rogue agents who try to put onto the markets fake pieces of music, which are recordings from the past, just slightly stretched or slightly compressed in order to make them sound different. But if you put them through AcoustID, you will see that they are exactly the same recording, just a little bit modified.
Vera:
So yeah, the very first thing would be to associate identifiers to every single piece of music. And I know that this seems basic to you, but believe me, it is not. There are still realities where the idea that every recording has its own ID is something futuristic, something scary, like, “What?”
Vera:
And yeah, we are still at that stage, and I am torn between explaining to people, “No, this is something that you really have to do.” And on the other hand, you have conferences like the Semantic Metadata or we have weekly conferences about AI and the uses of machine learning. And yeah, I’m so surprised that we still haven’t used AI for work in music, for example. I mean, what we are at the moment terrified of is AI as an agent for bad, an agent for destroying music. I don’t believe that in the least. I think AI could be extremely precious, a very useful instrument to make metadata or music or art much more readable for future generations.
Vera:
If I could in my ideal world, I would lead a team of R&D scientists to invent some algorithms that schematize music in the way that I described earlier.
Larry:
Interesting. Yeah. And as you talk about that, I’m thinking just the way my brain works, thinking about you have the works, the works and the different recordings of them and variants of them and labels for them, and then like you said, the provenance of them, where they come from. There’s so much to that, all of which can be described by the metadata.
Larry:
But that’s interesting you said that, you said something a minute ago that even the idea of every recording having its own ID is not accepted among some people. But it sounds like you have this job at the BBC and they’re paying you to do this, so you got support there.
Larry:
Is it more when you reach out to the, I don’t know, recording archives? I don’t know where you’re sourcing a lot of this from. Is it more with sheet music publishers or I don’t know where the problem people or not problem people, but the people who are further behind in understanding the importance of this metadata?
Vera:
Well, sometimes even in big radio stations, that can be a problem, let alone talking to the artists themselves or all their agents or sometimes even publishers. There seems to be quite a provocatiousness in saying, “We belong to the past. We don’t care about all this science thing. We are artists and we do things badly.”
Larry:
Well, that’s the beauty of art too, though. You don’t want to discourage that. But you do want to capture what they’ve done and ascribe metadata to it, so to write that love letter to the future, right? Is that-
Vera:
I think it’s a matter of laziness, intellectual laziness. We’ve been doing things this way for 400 years and we’ll never change. And there is this sense of either-or. Either we are artists or we are data scientists. Why not both? Why would you have to choose? You can be both.
Larry:
I love that. And you, you exemplify that, I think the way you span these worlds. Does that give you some credibility when you talk to, or have you made more progress than you think maybe others might have in terms of getting a little more appreciation of metadata among the folks you mentioned, like the radio stations and archives and the artists?
Vera:
Yes, I think I have. I think I have, because very often people ask for my help in saying, “Oh, why do we have this problem with archiving stuff?” And I’m like, “Well, because you don’t use metadata.” I think, yes, I’m doing something to make people understand that they need people like me or people like my colleagues, that they, as I said, they don’t have to be afraid of us.
Vera:
And to be honest, the BBC is a place where efforts come together for the greater good. We are all a bit idealists to work at the BBC. We all believe in the greater good, and I think it’s the right place for things to come together in a culturally constructive way.
Vera:
Obviously it’s not perfect. Obviously it’s not ideal. Obviously in order to do what I would like to do, it would need a lot of money, but I’ll just crack on. I’ll just insist and see where this adventure takes me. It’s wonderful. I love my job.
Larry:
Clearly. And one thing I want to add in both your efforts to evangelize metadata strategy to the entities in the classical music world, but also to what you just said, like going to your boss at the BBC and just saying, “Hey, I need a few hundred grand for this prototype. Can you help me out here?” For either of those, how do you measure the success of your work? How do you show people like, “Hey, you know that thing you did? Nobody would ever have seen it if I hadn’t put this metadata on it and made it more discoverable to other audiences,” or to your bosses to say like, “Oh, look, this fine-tuning we did to our metadata management strategy resulted in X more views of that stuff.” I guess that’s just sort of my making up things about how it might work, but how do you measure the effectiveness of a metadata program?
Vera:
That’s extremely complex, obviously, because, yeah, it’s not straightforward. We are not talking necessarily figures. We are talking about audience satisfaction. We are talking about the range of possibilities that the audience have to listen to the right piece of music.
Vera:
There are cases where, and I’m saying this not to slag off anyone, but unfortunately sometimes there are mistakes made. There are links that link from the BBC website to the wrong piece of music. So do you want to listen to Beethoven’s Night? Click here. And you click there and you listen to Brahms Second, something like that. And it shouldn’t happen. It simply shouldn’t happen. And that is a metadata problem at heart. So how do you measure it? Well, when you click on Beethoven’s Night and you listen to Beethoven’s Night, that’s your measure of success.
Larry:
Right. That’s sort of like one of the definitions of content strategy, getting the right content to the right person at the right time. Yeah, it’s in that same family.
Larry:
Hey, Vera, I can’t believe it, we’re coming up close to time. But before we wrap up, is there anything last, anything you want to revisit from the conversation or just want to make sure we share before we wrap up?
Vera:
I think, and here my philosophical roots come up again. Blaise Pascal, the great French philosopher who has influenced informatics, social science, natural science, biology. I believe that the phantom of Blaise Pascal hovers all the metadata work that we can do in every cultural environment. And people like him, people like the French encyclopedists are the historical proof that culture is one, that divisions are random, that we can all collaborate together to make the world a better place through technology, through art, through everything that the human mind can come up with, can concoct.
Larry:
Nice. If you have any good, I don’t know, biographies or overviews of Blaise Pascal’s work, I’d love to put them in the show notes. No, don’t have to. And I’ll do some research on my own too, but that’s brilliant. I love that, especially the notion that divisions are random and unnecessary. That resonates with my connect-ey ways.
Vera:
That’s good.
Larry:
Hey, one very last thing, Vera. If folks want to follow you or connect online, what’s the best place to connect?
Vera:
I would say LinkedIn with my name. My name is spelled V-E-R-A B-R-O-Z-Z-O-N-I. I say it very, very slowly because sometimes English-speaking people don’t, yeah, can’t spell my surname. But anyway, yeah, LinkedIn I would say is the best place, and then we take it from there.
Larry:
Excellent. I’ll put that in the show notes as well. Well, thank you so much, Vera. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Vera:
Thank you. It was a really, really pleasant chat and thank you so much for this occasion, Larry.
