Digiphon: A Digital Colophon

Here's a useful new word for the digital web 2.0 age:

Digiphon

A digiphon is

• A digital colophon
• A written piece of metadata
  that describes the digital tools (including computer hardware, computer
  software, and any other digital equipment) used to create a piece of
  digital media.

The word digiphon is a conjunction of the words 'digital' and 'colophon'. A colophon is "a brief description usually located at the end of a book, describing production notes relevant to the edition". Based on this definition, a digiphon is "a brief description, usually located at the end of a piece of digital media, describing production notes relevant to the digital media".

In the quickly-evolving world of digital media, including a digiphon in a piece of work can help other creators of digital media learn from each other's work. The digiphon is a succinct description of the production tools and process.

Examples

We currently see something similar to a digiphon at the bottom of many webpages -- "Powered By MediaWiki" or "Powered By Wordpress".

Here is a digiphon from a multi-media learning object created on Moodle:

Digiphon

• This media was produced on a MacBook Pro running OSX 10.5 (Leopard) with 4GB of RAM.

• I recorded and edited all the video using my computer's built-in camera, QuickTime Pro, and iMovie '06

• Audio was recorded using Audio Hijack Pro, edited with Quicktime and uploaded directly to GEL. Direct embedding was done using the embed tag.

• Survey was constructed, completed, and analyzed using SurveyMonkey.

History

The word digiphon was coined by Ethan C. Roland during his time at Gaia University working on a MSc in Collaborative Eco-Social Design. The program
encourages thorough documentation of work through, shared digitally with the Gaia University community on a Moodle-based Elearning platform.