Tags, Folksonomies &
Social Bookmarking
Do you use bookmarks – and how do you organize
them? Traditional = tree; social bookmarking =
(social) network.
 Who has tried del-icio.us?
 Who has tried tagging?
 Who has heard of web 2.0?
Just what the heck is
a) folksonomy?
b) social bookmarking?
c) tagging



NET ARCHIVE – great resource for looking
at shifts in web pages and comparing web
1.0 and 2.0. E.g.
http://web.archive.org/web/19961228024612/
http://www4.yahoo.com/
Social Software & Web 2.0



“Web 2.0” is an amorphous, fuzzy category that refers to a
heterogeneous mix of familiar and new technologies. However it
gestures toward the increasing centrality of tools that foster
community, collaboration, dialogue, bricolage (remixing), many to
many interaction, bottom-up systems, open source. Disaggregation
of forms, and the movement of software tools to the internet are
sometimes also included.
Central to web 2.0 is user generated content – an amazing number
of the most successful tech companies basically host content we
create. Usually advertisers and content producers partner – now,
google adsense = search plus user content.
“Social software” is often described as a major component of Web
2.0. This describes such tools as blogs, wikis, trackback,
podcasting, videocasting, social networking systems, social
bookmarking, tags and folksonomies.
Examples of web 2.0











Encyclopedia Britannica online vs. Wikipedia
Traditional bookmarks vs. social bookmarking
Traditional links vs. trackback, wikis, ping, etc.
“read only web” vs. “read-write web”
AOL vs. Facebook, Myspace, etc.
Old tree-based, hierarchical, top-down search paradigm vs.
Google
NYT vs. Digg/aggregators/MyNYT
Microsoft MapPoint versus Google maps (open to remix)
Kodak vs. Flickr
Desktop vs. networked office (jumpcut, google apps, etc.)
Others?
Representations of web 2.0
MAPS OF WEB 2.0

Subway map
http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/ia_webtrends_2007_2_1440x900.gif

Middle Earth http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/online_communities.png
Icons http://www.go2web20.net/

Tag cloud of web 2.0 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Web_2.0_Map.svg
Examples

"The Machine is Us/ing Us" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g

Remixing politicians http://www.thepartyparty.com/thepartyparty/rx/8832C194-06E3429D-ADF8-0F56D8A2A763.html

Sunday http://www.thepartyparty.com/thepartyparty/rx/633E038E-269A-4C9E-9A1E2C4684DBF20A.html

1984 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h3G-lMZxjo

Postsecret http://postsecret.blogspot.com/ remixed
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbrPks1rk-0




MOVIES http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfODSPIYwpQ
http://www.tatteredcoat.com/archives/2005/09/28/the-shining-redux/
http://www.tomatopatch.com/films/sleepless.htm
NEW VIDEO sites make it easy – can download youtube movies (on class
wiki) and remix without software (remix), automtically or by hand. E.g.
http://muvee.com/
Tags & Categorization

User generated content plus tags = revolution?

Add customization and aggregators and you have
some powerful new ways of reading and writing. We
move from push to pull, with much of what is pulled
created by people.
New media give use new ways and metaphors for
listing information, linking it, and categorizing it.
Does this require new literacies? What literacies are
needed in the world of web 2.0 when there is “no
shelf”? Do we need “tag literacy”?

Everybody playing Tag?

Tags represent a new way of making, sharing, reading and keeping track of
digital texts

Many different groups and institutions are experimenting with tags – academic
groups, business groups, community groups, civic groups, political groups.
Examples:

DELICIOUS & SOCIAL BOOKMARKING
Tags can be used for “social bookmarking,” where users store, categorize,
describe and share bookmarks. Del.icio.us is the most famous example of this.
With Delicious:
You can see which tags are most popular;
Delicious reminds users of previously used tags, suggests names for you, and
tells you the tag names other people used.
groups can create accounts;
a user can create an “inbox,” subscribing to what other people are bookmarking;
users can subscribe to tags and receive a list of new links tagged with that
name;
One can see who shares your tags, and learn from “kindred spirits”

I SUGGEST YOU JOIN DEL.ICIO.US AND PRACTICE USING TAGS, and
consider the kinds of uses you might be able to get out of this resource.
Playing Tag

CITE U LIKE
http://www.citeulike.org/faq/all.adp
http://www.citeulike.org/user/dperkel/article/258956
Scholars tag articles, books, conference proceedings, etc. Scholars also
make notes, summarize text, and provide links to related texts. THIS IS AN
EXCELLENT RESOURCE FOR YOUNG SCHOLARS. (It’s also great for
generating bibliographies). Scholars upload all their citations and
bibliographies, and can annotate them and reformat in different ways.

AMAZON lets you create and search books by user generated tags. E.G.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/tagging/glance/rhetoric/A1ER8EOEP7M8JD?ie
=UTF8

BUSINESSES ARE VERY INTERESTED IN THE COMMERCIAL USES OF
TAGGING AND FOLKSONOMIES
“Harvesting social knowledge from folksonomies,” by Wu H, Zubair M, Maly
K (HYPERTEXT '06: Proceedings of the seventeenth conference on
Hypertext and hypermedia).
“Collaborative tagging systems, or folksonomies, have the potential of
becoming technological infrastructure to support knowledge management
activities in an organization or a society. There are many challenges,
however. This paper presents designs that enhance collaborative tagging
systems to meet some key challenges: community identification, ontology
generation, user and document recommendation. Design prototypes,
evaluation methodology and selected preliminary results are presented.”



Some business connections to social
software and tagging sites has raised
concerns – see for example the controversy
over the http://www.43things.com/ site.
For a summary of the controversy, see:
http://www.salon.com/2005/02/08/43/
Everybody playing Tag?

ACADEMIC VERSIONS – of folksonomies, tagging systems and social
bookmarking are emerging.
Harvard Playlists & “H20”
Social bookmarking http://h2obeta.law.harvard.edu/62257
http://h2obeta.law.harvard.edu/home.do;jsessionid=323267530CAACF
DC7A2A3B78BAE3D32F
“The H2O project is building an interlocking collection of communities
based on the free creation and exchange of ideas. The recent
development of the Internet has been overwhelmingly driven by
commercial interests. Commercial websites must ultimately focus on
making money. The founding premise of the H2O project is that the
university world has something to add to the growth of the Internet that
the commercial world cannot contribute. H2O aims to apply Internet
technologies to the underlying aims of the academy -- the free creation
and exchange of ideas and the communities formed around those ideas
-- both within and beyond the confines of the traditional university
setting.”
Playing Tag






PENNTAGS PROJECT http://tags.library.upenn.edu/
PennTags is a social bookmarking tool for locating, organizing, and sharing your
favorite online resources. Members of the Penn Community can collect and maintain
URLs, links to journal articles, and records in Franklin, our online catalog and VCat,
our online video catalog. Once these resources are compiled, you can organize them
by assigning tags (free-text keywords) and/or by grouping them into projects,
according to your specific preferences. PennTags can also be used collaboratively,
because it acts as a repository of the varied interests and academic pursuits of the
Penn community, and can help you find topics and users related to your own favorite
online resources. PennTags was developed by librarians at the University of
Pennsylvania.
How is PennTags different from my bookmarks? Think of PennTags as an enhanced
version of your bookmarks but with the following differences:
PennTags is available to you from any computer, unlike personal bookmarks on your
computer.
PennTags allows you to add tags to your posts, helping you organize and find posts
later.
PennTags is a social discovery system; you can see what others are posting and
what tags they are using.
You can sort items of interest by tag, project or user, unlike bookmarks which can
only be found by folder name.
You can create an RSS feed for tags in PennTags, so anytime that tag is used, you
will be notified in your RSS feed reader.
Playing tag
•
Tags can be arranged into concept maps called “tag clouds.” Many
blogs use this: E.G. http://www.petefreitag.com/tags/
•
Some Doctors use tag clouds to aggregate what is being posted on
medical blogs: http://kidneynotes.blogspot.com/2005/09/medicalblogosphere-tag-cloud.html
•
Various professions and businesses are using tag clouds and other
tools to keep track of publications

Popular sites such as Flickr use tag clouds to help users get the “big
picture” http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/

Many news media sites provide tag clouds as news ways of accessing
their information in new ways.
http://www.nytimes.com/gst/mostsearched.html?period=30&format=tag
cloud (New York Times tagcloud)
But – see against word clouds,


http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/10/word-clouds-considered-harmful/
Research Topics




Tags, tag clouds, social bookmarking and social software would
make great research topics for young scholars such as
yourselves (new and sexy topic areas, and little has been done).
You could focus on educational, civic, or business uses of
tagging. You could summarize current practices and research,
examining the key technological and cultural issues – what
systems seem to work best for particular communities, purposes,
forms of writing/research, interaction, communication, etc.? Do
we need to train, educate, or have a particular mix of people or
social factors for tagsonomies to work? Is there a need for “tag
literacy,” as some have suggested?
How do such technologies change the way people use web texts,
think about them, remember things, etc?
You could contextualize and historicize the current moment by
relating tag use to previous classification systems and ways of
managing (and conceptualizing) memory.


Tagged material has many potential uses.
Can you think of any?
E.g. anthropology of everyday life (Flickr and
weddings in Japan; the touristic gaze;
conferences and getting the big view of
events.)
A few questions to consider



Do you consider that there has been a significant shift in the
last few years, from “Web 1.0” to “Web 2.0”? Has your
experience of the Internet shifted in some noticeable way?
List the way people in your group have used tags, blogs, wikis
and other kinds of social software. List any ways they have
changed the way you produce or consume digital texts; the
way you write, think, or interact with others.
How might tag clouds and social bookmarking be useful? They
are lists, but new kinds of list, made possible by new media. As
lists, how do/might they change your (one’s) experience of the
web – of reading, writing, and making sense of information?
What some people are saying




Tags and social bookmarking enable creative new ways of
finding, annotating, and remembering information.
Finding people with related interests magnifies one’s work and
can lead to many types of collaboration. People can learn from
each other’s browsing, research, and “conceptual maps.”
User-created tagging can offer new perspectives on one’s
research and writing. Tag clouds and tag clusters reveal patterns
and absences that are otherwise hard to reflect on. You get
distance from, and can reflect on the way you browse and search
through digital texts.
Multi-authored bookmarked and tagged pages can be useful for
team projects.


Weinberger says classification systems are
not value free and objective. Can you think of
examples?
Weinberger asks: does the world make sense
of do we make sense of the world? (Plato:
key to knowing is to “carve nature at its
joints”)
APA conference 1972
Literacy & Classification
Categories, meaning & Identity – emergent,
socially constructed, “prototypical” (probabilistic),
contextual - or fixed, universal, transcendent,
timeless?
Rhetoric tends toward the former world view.
Rhetoric & Social Construction
This brings us to the following questions: what is rhetoric, and what is social
construction?





Plato: “RHETORIC is the art of ruling the minds of men.”
Rhetorica ad Herennium (ca. 80 BCE) The task of the public speaker is to discuss capably those
matters which law and custom have fixed for the uses of citizenship, and to secure as far as possible the
agreement of his hearers.
Aristotle (ca. 350 BCE) Let rhetoric be [defined as] an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the
available means of persuasion.
Nietzsche What is called “rhetorical,” as a means of conscious art, had been active as a means of
unconscious art in language and its development, indeed, that the rhetorical is a further development,
guided by the clear light of the understanding, of the artistic means which are already found in
language…a power which Aristotle calls rhetoric, is, at the same time, the essence of language. Rhetoric
and Language, p 21.
Werry “Rhetoric refers to the study of spoken, written and visual language understood as socially
situated action. Rhetoric investigates how language is used to organize and maintain social groups,
construct meanings and identities, coordinate behavior, mediate power, produce change, and create
knowledge. Rhetoric assumes that language is constitutive (we shape and are shaped by language),
dialogic (it exists in the shared territory between self and other), closely connected to thought (mental
activity as “inner speech”) and integrated with the social, cultural and economic dimensions of life.
Rhetorical study and written literacy are understood to be essential to civic, professional and academic
life.”
Rhetoric & Social Construction





Rhetoric provides a conceptual map for the study of reasoning (argument)
and communication that approaches categories as social constructs, as
“site and stake in struggle” over meaning.
It is often interested in the “commonplaces” of thought (memory loci
become commonplace books, where people stored culturally significant
materials. Commonplaces are also the taken for granted ideologies, values
etc inscribed in language).
It tends to see categories as prototypical, context-dependent, culturally and
historically situated, emergent and processual
Consider “formal” and “informal” approaches to argument/reasoning (closed
systems vs. open, logical operators vs. broad categories, absolute truth
values vs. degrees of plausibility, propositions vs, situated utterances.
Consider a “rhetorical,” reflexive approach to grammar vs. a formal,
“structural” approach. (Is “good” an adjective or adverb?)
Rhetoric & Social Construction
Style as persuasion, tropes as terministic screens, categories as
constructions.
Consider how the following everyday categories construct the world
in particular ways:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Far East, Middle East, Near East
Mr, Mrs, Miss, Ms.
Negro, Black, African American
The Maori Wars, The New Zealand Wars, The Land Wars
Or: “the war on drugs”; “male pattern baldness,” “social phobia” (the
medicalization of ailments, personal problems, age, etc.) “teenager,”
“baby boomer,” “tweener,” “war on terror,” pronouns of address; political
discourse in totalitarian and democratic societies.
Rhetoric & Social Construction

What is Essentialism? Essentialism is an
orientation toward reality, knowledge, truth, and the
identity of things in the world that posits that the
'reality' of these things is to be found in their
'essence', or in their innermost nature. To know the
truth about a given concept or category, we
concentrate on uncovering its essence or inner
being. Its essence is an internal property that
defines its Being. This essence is: timeless, fixed,
immutable, universal, trans-historical and transcultural.
Rhetoric & Social Construction

What is Social Construction? Social Construction is a “muddy,”
deeply contested term. However, some salient characteristics are
the following. Social construction is an orientation toward reality,
knowledge, truth, and identity that posits that these things are
dependent on social, political, discursive, economic (and
sometimes cognitive) processes, and on shifting ways of viewing
and representing the world. It is sometimes relativist in character,
and tends to stress the extent to which forms of knowledge,
language and social interaction are intertwined. Social
construction emphasizes the cultural and historical specificity of
knowledge, truth, identity, and our representations and
categorizations of the world. Knowledge, conceptual frameworks
and systems of representation are seen as caught up in forms of
life and language, and therefore always in process.
Rhetoric & Social Construction



Categories: is race a social construction?
Gender?
Heterosexuality/homosexuality?
Memory & New Media

If we are going to think about new media and how it might be
built in ways that reflect a more sophisticated understanding of
literacy – its history, theorization, relation to memory, etc. – then
we may find it useful to read authors such as Yates.

What resources do new media provide us with for managing
memory – both collectively (think wikipedia, blogs, social
software etc.) and individually (think personal memory
management systems, PIMS, tiddlywikis, scrapbooks, etc.? How
can we establish modern “memory places” that let us annotate
texts, track where we have been, and create personally
meaningful connections between texts?