Folksonomies,
Social Tagging,
and Library
Catalogs
By: Niki Kranich
Information Visualization (554)
May 6, 2008
Three programs
1. Digg Labs Stack
http://labs.digg.com/stack
2. SpaceNav
http://www.ivy.fr/revealicious/demo/space
nav.html
3. TagGraph
http://www.taggraph.com
Digg Labs Stack
100 stories
Color & motion
Real time activity
Digg Labs Stack
Diggers (circled in red)
They represent a story being
“dug”, falling from the top of
the screen. They increase
the length of the bar they
fall on.
Colors
The more popular stories are a
brighter shade of green.
Digg Labs Stack
Stories are also color coded with more popular
stories being green. Users can also hover over the
bars to see which story they reference, as seen
above.
SpaceNav
How popular are del.icio.us tags
in relation to other tags?
SpaceNav
Highlighting is used to
show the user which tag
they are currently
viewing.
Direct Manipulation: the user can drag the
items all across the workspace, including into
the tag list area.
SpaceNav
History is shown by the white lines hiding beneath the main picture,
by virtue of occlusion. If the user hovers of the (red) circled white
node, the system shows them both where the tag is in the alphabetical
list, along with where the tag is visually in the workspace.
TagGraph
TagGraph
Zooming: Users have
the option to zoom in
and out to see more of
the workspace
Users can display more
images by clicking on
more images
Related tags: Clicking on this shows the tags of all the “green”
images. Users can then click on the tag keywords to view more
images with that keyword.
TagGraph
Drawbacks: The system
tends to crash easily.
Here the user is looking
at 63 images, with an
option to look at up to
21,000+ images.
Asking the system to display all the tags for each
of the 63 pictures generally crashes the system,
giving the user an error.
Tying it all together: folksonomies
and libraries
Lamson Library’s catalog
Ann Arbor Library District’s tag cloud
Tying it all together: folksonomies
and libraries
What if patrons could visually see the relationship between
catalog items, such as in TagGraph or SpaceNav?
What if patrons could see reviews of cataloged items, such
as in Dig Labs Stack?
For instance. . .
• Which items get the most reviews?
• Which users give the most reviews?
• Which items are most popular within the catalog?
Information Visualization
and Libraries . . .
. . . Where can we, as information
professionals, go from here?