This weeks articles cover the many aspects of tagging and folksonomies and their advantages and disadvantages from a variety of viewpoints. I wondered why Ellyssa Kroski called her article 'The Hive Mind' and looking at Wikipedia it is a kind of groupthink or collective consciousness and conformity or a software framework - maybe the collective consciousness of social insects such as bees. The article was inaccessible on the Internet on Tuesday evening (June 26th) around 9.30 pm. However I had read it earlier in the week and was interested to read about the 'Long Tail' phenomenon which had not come across before. It is relevant to tagging where the views of the minorities with less popular tags will be more in number than the more popular tags. The non mainstream topics outnumber the more popular ones and it is descriptive of a graph showing a long tail at the end of the statistical distribution.
Two of the articles this week, one by Emanuele Quinterelli and by Carol Ou talk about finding the 'middle ground' between user tagging at one end and the classification by a librarian at the other end and this may be the future direction of social bookmarking. Alex Wright wrote that
'a middle ground between.. bottom up tagging and top down controlled vocabularies....where end users could freely create, adopt or reject terms stored in a distributed repository that gets administered by a representative authority that 'owns' the vocabulary'
Emanuele Quinterelli says that 'All that we have to do is to merge and leverage emerging and traditional tools to improve findability. Somewhere at the intersection of those two models is a more powerful framework for identifying, sharing and finding information.'
He concludes by saying that 'Traditional hierarchies for organising information (or reality) will not be replaced by tags, but through tagging we are finding new ways of thinking about classification and new applications for organising and sharing knowledge'. He sees tagging and the new bottom up system as being a step towards a new way of organising information that will develop in the future. This is the view supported by Jon Lebowski.
In summary I liked the comment by Timo Hannay where he describes a folksonomy as a 'liberating, not restrictive; bottom up, not imposed; relational, not hierarchical. It also cleverly harnesses selfish acts and directs them towards the common good. But most of all, it just seems to fit the way our brains work'
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3 comments:
Hey Jane! You know as I was reading your post I was thinking how many of us go with what works - and unwilling to change the status quo (don't ask me why - since it probably is totally irrelevant to the discussion). For a long time, traditional classification worked - but based on all the stuff I have seen (especially this semester) on the blogs, wikis, etc we have visited - I don't see how we could even apply that type of system. So maybe, until that "middle ground" is achieved, folksonomies also work
Hi Jane,
Do you think folksonomies are liberating? I like them because I can tag things for myself, and it helps create common interest groups. But I find 'serendipity' to be restrictive. With folksonomies, we cannot expect to search and find something. The lack of structure, I feel, will cause problems in the future.
Hi Jane - great post. Also, Monika raises an interesting point above -- the lack of structure in a folksonomy can be problematic for those of us who are comfortable working within a hierarchical subject tree.
I've read about a few exercises to impose a "structure" upon folksonomies, and some work (especially when they're really simple folksonomies or when they are used on a specific type of object -- like photographs in Flickr), but others have disastrous results. It will be interesting to see if the development of clustering systems/engines will have any impact on this in the future...
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