articles on tagging (help?)
I’m working on a literature review of tagging for a class. I am particularly interested in the collective action and cultural convergence aspects work.
I’ve been traipsing through various articles and blog entries on the topic and i’m wondering if folks know of good pieces that i’ve missed. I’m looking for articles that analyze tagging either through data, through situated comparisons or through philosophical hammering. They don’t have to be academic, but they do have to contribute something new. I’m not looking for how-tos or discussions of particular services. I’m also trying to focus on unique viewpoints as opposed to round-ups.
I would also be stoked if anyone knows of any information management literature on the cultural underpinnings of keywords and indexing or anything involving collective action and librarianship in metadata. How do differences across libraries or across countries get resolved?
Below is what i have so far. Any additions would be *very* much appreciated (and i promise to post what i write).
- Tom Coates: Two cultures of fauxonomies collide…
- Ian Davis: Why Tagging is Expensive
- Scott Golder & Bernardo Huberman: The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems
- Liz Lawley: social consequences of social tagging
- Peter Merholz: Clay Shirky’s Viewpoints are Overrated
- Adam Mathes: Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata
- Nicolaus Mote: The New School of Ontologies
- Clay Shirky: Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags
- Rashmi Sinha: A cognitive analysis of tagging (or how the lower cognitive cost of tagging makes it popular)
- Thomas Van Der Wal: Explaining and Showing Broad and Narrow Folksonomies
- Adam Weinroth: Tag Team
- Michael Wexler: I hate tags, I still hate tagging, I continue to despise tagging
- Mimi Yen: Hierarchy Versus Facets Versus Tags
Jon Udell’s “Language Evolution in del.icio.us” is kind of interesting, although I guess it’s a “screencast,” not an article.
Danah- I look forward to your future work on tags. Here’s a few others that you’ve missed.
Google adds tags to the search history feature:
http://google.blognewschannel.com/index.php/archives/2005/10/10/google-adds-tagging/
del.icio.us tool collection
http://pchere.blogspot.com/2005/02/absolutely-delicious-complete-tool.html
tag search engine clusty
http://clusty.com/
tag search engine gataga (seems to have disappeared?)
http://www.gataga.com/index.php
Brian Del Vecchio on a tag-aware RSS reader
http://drupal.hybernaut.com/bdv/tag-aware-rss-reader.html
Dorothea on folksonomies
http://cavlec.yarinareth.net/archives/2005/01/16/folksonomies-and-classification/
Jon Udell on tags (this is one of the earliest mentions of tags as we know them now)
http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/08/20/34OPstrategic_1.html
Mimi Yin:
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/HierarchyVersusFacetsVersusTags
This is more a personal musing but I do think it is worth noting the psychological outlook/profile of the user when talking about the relative merits of tagging vs more traditional forms of IA. As a chronic ADHD’er, tagging makes far more intuitive sense to me than force-fitting things into a priori buckets.
http://gordon.blogsmith.com/2005/02/25/add-adhd-flat-hierarchies-folksonomies-amp-organizational/
danah,
This is described as a theoretical and philosophical post from WeBreakStuff, a blog by Frederico Oliveira. He discusses tagging and social bookmarks and the motivations behind it. He asks readers to leave comments about how and why they tag. Interesting comments so far.
good luck.
http://webreakstuff.com/blog/2005/10/tagging-and-social-bookmarks/
On Tag Clouds, Metric, Tag Sets and Power Laws
http://blog.pietrosperoni.it/2005/05/25/tag-clouds-metric/
Tagwebs, Flickr, and the Human Brain
http://blumpy.org/tagwebs/
[seems to be down now, use yahoo! or google cache]
I think “Tag spa_m” is also an important topic you might want to cover but I don’t know of any good resource covering it. Anyway you might want to check the following ones or write a clever one yourself
(I didn’t read all the posts you are linking, someone of them deals with “tag spa_m”?)
http://moloko.itc.it/paoloblog/archives/2005/01/29/what_is_tag_spam_or_better_tag_spam_exists.html
http://www.micropersuasion.com/2005/07/yahoo_myweb_bec.html
And, maybe you already checked but it might make sense to see what folkosomies services for research say about “folksonomy”
http://www.citeulike.org/tag/folksonomy
http://www.connotea.org/tag/folksonomy
Tag Literacy
http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/2005/04/tag_literacy.html
I haven’t read it yet but it seems academicish and with some literature citations.
For more or less published stuff:
- http://del.icio.us/mathemagenic/papers%2Bfolksonomy
If you haven’t already check out groop.us. Solution Watch blogged about it at http://www.solutionwatch.com/260/groopus-tagging-in-social-networks/
Gene Smith’s stuff is pretty important including the original release of “folksonomy” onto the network:
http://atomiq.org/archives/2004/08/folksonomy_social_classification.html
also http://atomiq.org/archives/2005/04/market_populism_in_the_folksonomies_debate.html
and to top it off I believe he is the one running Tagsonomy: http://www.tagsonomy.com/
Thanks for at least including my name. With luck, the link will follow.
I would add:
1. Pietro Speroni: On Tag Clouds, Metric, Tag Sets and Power Laws.
http://blog.pietrosperoni.it/2005/05/25/tag-clouds-metric/
2. You’re It!: Dynamic Growth of Tag Clouds
http://tagsonomy.com/index.php/dynamic-growth-of-tag-clouds/
3. Master Thesis Groups in Social Software: Utilizing Tagging to Integrate Individual Contexts for Social Navigation
http://groop.us/blog/Thesis_KBMZ.pdf
Someone already linked to my Tag Literacy article. Here’s an earlier piece:
A del.icio.us study
http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/2004/12/a_delicious_stu.html
And here are a couple more I didn’t see above:
Master Thesis: Groups in Social Software: Utilizing Tagging to Integrate Individual Contexts for Social Navigation
http://groop.us/blog/?p=8
A cognitive analysis of tagging
http://www.rashmisinha.com/archives/05_09/tagging-cognitive.html
Liners: Splogs, Pulse, Drunk Brunch
Yesterday saw another EFF Drunk Brunch at Hyde Park’s Speakers’ Corner in London: ZDNet UK has the story; Flickr has the photos (and photos of past Drunk Brunches at Speakers’ Corner). Favorite shots: Rufus Pollock at the September Brunch; Suw…
Unless I’m mistaken, it’s “Peter Merholz” (no “t”).
It wouldn’t be the interweb if I couldn’t include my own stuff.
http://atomiq.org/archives/2005/09/ian_davis_on_why_tagging_is_expensive.html
http://atomiq.org/archives/2005/08/ontology_is_overrated_followup.html
http://atomiq.org/archives/2005/04/market_populism_in_the_folksonomies_debate.html
http://atomiq.org/archives/2004/08/folksonomy_social_classification.html
Good example of how extensible ontologies branch into incredibly esoteric fields and allow for the unknown. Also check out World of Warcraft and the complex economic and social interaction that takes place through XML feeds and a client program – ripe for a paper. NPR interview about social reactions to a recent plague in the virtual world: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4946772.
alexandra samuel in the toronto star >> http://www.alexandrasamuel.com/archive/today-in-the-toronto-star-tagging/
David Weinberger had a good review article in Release 1.0 this spring (excerpt: http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/misc/taxonomies_and_tags.html). It’s not available in full online, unfortunately.
Hm, despite running several Tag Tuesday events, I don’t seem to have any essays written up, which I should rectify.
However, I do have a video clip of me discussing tagging issues at the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium
We don’t have a paper yet but you might like to check out http://www.blinklist.com simply for the implementation on how we organize tags into a tag manager. I think what we have done may be of interest and is rather unique. For example, you can select favorite tags and look at your tags in many different ways.
If you need some raw data for analysis let me know. We might be able to provide you some info.
Mike
Our Master Thesis: Groups in Social Software: Utilizing Tagging to Integrate Individual Contexts for Social Navigation
(Started a list of suggestions here, but realized that I have too many to parse out of my files right now–let me know if you want more!)
Tags stuck on trees (with pictures!)
http://icite.net/blog/200506/tags_trees.html
Clay Shirky’s Viewpoints are Overrated
http://www.peterme.com/archives/000558.html
Ontology is Overrated follow-up
http://atomiq.org/archives/2005/08/ontology_is_overrated_followup.html
semantic-web@w3.org‘s semantic view on tags
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2005Mar
(see threads on Tag ontology, Tag ontology RFC, Tag metaphor and Tag User Interface) and Richard Newman’s resources around the development of a Tag ontology:
http://www.holygoat.co.uk/blog/entry/2005-03-23-2
Picking Up Where Search Leaves Off
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_15/b3928112_mz063.htm
Stefano Mazzocchi on Folksologies: de-idealizing ontologies
http://www.betaversion.org/~stefano/linotype/news/85/
How should the relationships between tags be defined, and by whom?
http://blogs.msdn.com/alexbarn/archive/2005/04/10/406909.aspx
Folksonomy: social classification
http://atomiq.org/archives/2004/08/folksonomy_social_classification.html
Stewart Butterfield on why tagging, not anything more complex, works well in Flickr:
http://www.sylloge.com/personal/2004/08/folksonomy-social-classification-great.html
IM dialog between Stewart and Joshua Shacter of del.icio.us
http://sylloge.com/personal/2004/09/flickr-and-del.html
Taxonomy of folksonomies
http://www.salas.com/weblogs/archives/000608.html
Forgot to include this one (which is a very recent and very prominent article):
Authority, by Peter Morville
http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000057.php
Wow – this is utterly fascinating!! Thank you sooo much for all of this. Here are some other references i’ve received via email:
David Bearman and Jennifer Trant: Social Terminology Enhancement through Vernacular Engagement
Prejudices and antipathies: a tract on the LC subject heads concerning people / by Sanford Berman
Bowker, G. & Star, S.L. (1999). Sorting Things out: Classification and Its Consequences
Other Peter Merholz articles:
http://www.peterme.com/archives/000451.html
http://www.peterme.com/archives/000412.html
Matt Locke has a good review of Susan Leigh Star’s book “Sorting Things Out” which is very relevant for thinking around folksonomy.
http://www.test.org.uk/archives/002370.html
brief but thoughty, not heavily analytical, by bruce sterling in wired. contains this line, “Ultimately no human brain, no planet full of human brains, can possibly catalog the dark, expanding ocean of data we spew.”: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.04/view.html?pg=4
Here are some links I’ve found posted on a Knowledge management board. It appears to have a respectable ref list for more digging.
Hammond, T., Hannay, T., Lund, B., Scott, J., Social Bookmarking Tools – A General Review, D-Lib Magazine, April 2005.
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html
And here’s another wired article on tagging from Feb 2005
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,66456,00.html
also forgot to add, if you go to dlib and do a query for “tag” there’s a whole list that pops up with some case studies on social bookmarking.
Here’s one:
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/lund/04lund.html
You might be interested in the following blog by Otis Chichimichi. He has been analyzing and publishing the tagging behaviours of the Simpy.com bookmarking service. (I believe he is one of the creators of the Simpy.com site.)
http://blog.simpy.com/blojsom/blog/
I see Paolo have already added my entry to the list. And although the entry he listed is the main one I wrote on tags, it’s not the only, and mor eimportantly not the one that deals specifically with cultural changes. More than working to understand that (which is quite mathemathically oriented!) you might want to directly read:
tagclouds and cultural changes.
Have fun.
Pietro
D.J. Foskett 1980 “Thesaurus”
In Kent, Lancour, Daily (eds) Encyc. of Library and Information Science, v30, pp.416-462 also found in
Spark-Jones, Willet 1997 _Readings in Information Retrieval_
If you are interested in past practices similar to tagging you might want to look at this article about the use of the thesaurus concept in information retrieval.
A little late to this party
Loosely Coupled Community/Nptech Tag
http://ext337.org/article/loosely-coupled-communities-and-the-nptech-tag
NPTECH Tag Playlist
http://h2obeta.law.harvard.edu/59925
You asked:
> I would also be stoked if anyone knows of any information
> management literature on the cultural underpinnings of
> keywords and indexing or anything involving collective action
> and librarianship in metadata. How do differences across
> libraries or across countries get resolved?
I recommend Sorting Things Out by Geoffrey Bowker & Susan Leigh Star. One of the key lessons of the book iis that the ongoing process of classification and reclassification, not just having a useful taxonomy, is itself one of the most powerful forms of knowledge building.
Looks like no one has mentioned The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging, Ellyssa Kroski’s thoughtful review from an LIS perspective.
Hi Danah,
Did you ever publish a summary on all this?
No summary but it got incorporated into a paper on tagging that Mor, Cameron, Marc and i wrote. If your curious, the conference version is called “Position Paper, Tagging, Taxonomy, Flickr, Article, ToRead” and it is currently up at: http://www.danah.org/papers/