Vera Brozzoni

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

LinkedIn

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MKWKw0x7uc

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 coll...