Metadata is useful and really wasn't possible before the advent of the computer. Now, data can be stored and sorted in millions of different ways. That is a great help to people who study language. Now, words can be tagged, tracked, quantified, and graphed. That's beautiful, because now, language is not so much a craft or art as it is a science. This will help everyone from those who teach languages to others to those who teach language as a means of written communication.
It would be important for example to know which words are truly the first thousand words in a language or the most utilitarian words in the workplace for various professions. Students of a language would learn what they need much faster than in the guessing method of learning grammar with random words.
It would also be important in teaching students to write more practically rather than in some nebulous style that is supposedly appreciated more than other styles. For instance, there is a method of writing analysis called the T-unit. It measures the length of the sentence in particular. As it turns out, there is not a particular style that is appreciated, but a particular length of sentence that is appreciated. The T-unit measure of 14 - 18 is appreciated for clarity much more than T-unit measures outside that range. So teachers should instruct students in writing a particularly clear length rather than in stringing words together according to a particular "style."
I hope that many studies will be conducted about all the facets of language, including literature (which also subsumes film and YouTube videos). In this way we can escape the needless slavery of doing well in "language arts" and "foreign languages" in school and, as early in life as our genes allow, we can began using language (and a second language) in a way that will serve our individual interests and career choices.
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