[Sigcr-l] question on The Power To Tag 12|03

[Simon Spero]

On Tue, Dec 1, 2009 at 10:10 PM, Hope A Olson <holson at uwm.edu> wrote:

> I would certainly not argue against there being value in social tagging. On
> the contrary, I think there is considerable potential in tagging, especially
> on a large scale, being of considerable value in a better understanding of
> the way people practice aboutness and how they put together their ideas.
> Combining tags with controlled vocabularies is one good idea. Another
> approach is to use the analysis of tag distribution to identify the core
> characteristics of whatever is being tagged. My concern is with the term
> "folksonomy" which sounds like either a purposely ordered standard or an
> order that evolved from a specific culture and I believe that the
> collectivity of terms assigned by taggers is neither.
>

When he coined the term, Tom Vander Wal intended for it to mean something
closer  to the cognitive anthropology evolved hierarchy model  but became a
victim of public meaning.  Dave Weinberger tends to use the term in more of
a tagging sense.

Where I see the real benefits from tagging is where you have  items that are
assigned both tags and subjects from a controlled vocabulary. I had hoped to
use LCSH as the CV, but the syndetic structure is so messed up that fixing
it is a challenge in itself.

I think that this should be one of the goals for the coming Year of
Cataloging Dangerously.

There also needs to be some serious look at subdivisions; there are good
reasons to be concerned about whether they have a clearly defined meaning,
and whether that meaning is understood by users and catalogers.  There don't
seem to be any major studies apart from the Michigan work from a decade ago,
which was suggestive, but which seems to have some serious methodological
problems that make the results hard to evaluate.  I'll try and write a bit
more on this tomorrow, but comparisons with Gleitman and Gleitman's Phrase
and paraphrase are suggestive.

Simon