Metadata and Murukku
Information Beauty
Infophilia: A Positive Psychology of Information | December 20, 2025, Vol. 3, Issue 73
✨Welcome to Infophilia, a weekly letter exploring how our love of information and connections can help us all thrive, individually and collectively. This is one of the places where we’re pioneering a positive, evolutionary, social and cultural psychology of information, a living lab, avant-garde research. We’re shining a light to deepen our understanding of the power of information.
If this is your first time, we’re glad to have you here. We began 2025 with Information Literacy at 50 (open access) but you can go back further for essays on Infophilia and the Dopamine Connection, Infophilic Information Styles, and Artificial Intelligence.
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Cite as: Coleman, A. S. (2025). Metadata and murukku: Information beauty. Infophilia: A Positive Psychology of Information, 3(73).
WORD COUNTS:
Introduction: ~987 words
Story (M & M): ~1,280 words
Notes: ~824 words
Total: ~3,091 words
Metadata and Murukku
Information Beauty
My Gift To You: Information Aesthetics
Information beauty isn’t decoration but epistemology—ways of seeing, knowing, and being.
Very few scholars in library and information science (LIS) have engaged the problem—in the philosophical sense—of information as beauty. And even when they do, it’s limited to specific areas of practice and design theorists in general tend to predominate. Consider information design (visualizations) or even embodied information. Christopher Lueg has critiqued LIS for its estrangement with “embodiment” and offered “embodied cognition” which includes embodied information practices. Collaborative work in this area includes practice, bodies, and sense-making rather than aesthetic beauty, however.
Information aesthetics already exists as a field in human-computer interaction and data visualization. Since 2007, scholars have explored it as research focusing on aesthetic experience, dataset interpretation, and interaction design—analyzing visualization techniques by their interpretative intent and data mapping inspiration. This work positions information aesthetics as “the conceptual link between information visualization and visualization art,” including social and ambient visualization. My own use of information aesthetics builds on and yet differs from this tradition. Rather than focusing on visual representation of data, I’m concerned with embodied information practices—how humans experience information through taste, touch, ritual, memory, and cultural knowledge. This is information aesthetics as lived experience, affective and embodied, not interface design. It’s about the sensory and cultural dimensions of information that exist before and beyond screens and visualizations.
A couple of scholars have examined how power over beauty operates through information systems. Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression reveals how beauty standards embed themselves in algorithmic structures. Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology demonstrates that aesthetic choices in technology are never neutral—they enact information politics. LIS also has strong traditions in information ethics and design—visual and spatial aesthetics of information systems and library spaces. What remains missing, however, is a narrative that enacts information aesthetics through sensory detail—that shows rather than analyzes how humans love, curate, avoid, and embody information.
Writers, outside LIS, have approached this terrain. M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! uses fragmentation and embodiment to theorize what archives erase. Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments treats Black women’s lives as archival practice, positioning beauty as knowledge-making. Anne Carson blends classical scholarship with intensely physical prose. Jenny Offill (Dept. of Speculation), Claudia Rankine (Citizen, Just Us), and Carmen Maria Machado (In the Dream House and graphic work) experiment with form to capture how consciousness processes information in fragments, loops, and sensory bursts.
Historian Maurice Lee’s Overwhelmed: Literature, Aesthetics, and the Nineteenth-Century Information Revolution (2019) demonstrates that concerns about information abundance, reading practices, and the relationship between literature and information are not new—they mattered deeply in the nineteenth century as print expansion created new information challenges. Lee shows that literature and information were entangled in collaborative rather than oppositional ways. His work raises urgent questions for LIS today: What is our disciplinary legacy in the age of generative AI, synthetic data, and algorithmic curation? If the world’s oldest records are bibliographic, what literary beauty are we creating in our metadata? What will future generations make of our information aesthetics?
Lee’s concerns become even more pressing given today’s visualization revolution. Technical fields have developed increasingly sophisticated visual representations—genomics tools like Circos create circular visualizations of genome structure and relationships, and scientometrics produces elaborate maps of disciplinary connections. These are powerful for experts but require specialized visual literacy that many people don’t have. As autonomous vehicles, AI decision systems, and algorithmic interfaces proliferate in everyday life, this visual literacy gap widens dangerously. Information aesthetics grounded in embodied practice offers a crucial counterbalance: sensory ways of knowing through taste, touch, ritual, and memory that don’t require technical training but draw on deep evolutionary and cultural wisdom. This isn’t a rejection of visualization but a recognition that information lives in multiple registers—and the embodied ones may be the most universally accessible.
Mainstream information science has rarely offered narrative, sensorial accounts that make information theory visceral—that treat LIS scholarship as the felt, aesthetic life of information, demonstrating adaptive information practices through the taste of murukku, the weight of gold jewelry, the flicker of clay lamps. There are rich ethnographies of food, ritual, and material culture in other fields (anthropology, religious studies, sensory ethnography) and some LIS work on food blogs, domestic practice, and ritualized spaces, but not a canonical LIS text that uses those particular sensory images to stage information theory per se. This is the gap I address today.
Why does this matter? Because information science risks remaining abstract, technical, divorced from how humans actually experience information. We theorize metadata but forget the body. We discuss information literacy but neglect pleasure (there are some attempts to illuminate the pleasure of information but none draws on our evolutionary history like infophilia does). We analyze systems but ignore beauty. If information science is to be truly human-centered, we need richer accounts of information’s lives in our senses, our cultures, our rituals—beyond our databases, LLMs, and our heads.
This short story introduces what I call information aesthetics—the study and practice of information as embodied, sensory, and beautiful. It enacts my theory of adaptive infophilia: how humans love information, curate meaning from scarcity or abundance, and build identity through what we choose to know, taste, wear, light, and share. In post-truth societies drowning in information, adaptive infophilia offers more than survival strategies. It offers a way to thrive—by recognizing that beauty is data, the body keeps archives, and embodied emotions, not just cognition, are how we also make meaning.
What follows is fiction, but it performs theory. It’s my gift for the season, an invitation to experience information differently. Read with your senses. Perhaps even treat yourself to a murukku with your next cup of coffee or tea. Notice what you crave, what resonates, and what you would curate from your own scarcity or abundance.
Let the feast begin.