Quotes re: Folksonomies and Social Classification
"It may sound idiotically simple, but according to technology's leading seer, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, searching for information -- not sorting it -- is the wave of the future." Searching for the Perfect OS by Leander Kahney, Wired, 2004-07-02 (1)
"There used to be a difference between data and metadata.
Data was the suitcase and metadata was the name tag on it" Peter Morville (1)
"Folksonomies ... don't support searching and other types of browsing nearly as well as tags from controlled vocabularies applied by professionals" Lou Rosenfeld (2)
"Building, maintaining, and enforcing a controlled vocabulary is, relative to folksonomies, enormously expensive... Clay Shirky (1) (2)
"lowest common denominator classificaton" Liz Lawley (2)
"It doesn’t matter whether we “accept” folksonomies, because we’re not going to be given that choice. The mass amateurization of publishing means the mass amateurization of cataloging is a forced move." Clay Shirky
"Folksonomy: Tagging not Taxing" Thomas Vander Wal (3)
Perhaps this illustrates the limit of folksonomies - they are only useful in a context in which nothing is at stake. Folksonomies are, in essence, just vernacular vocabularies; the ad-hoc languages of intimate networks. Matt Locke
“The beauty of tagging is that it taps into an existing cognitive process without adding add much cognitive cost” Rashmi Sinha, Researcher & Consultant, Uzanto
from: A cognitive analysis of tagging (4)
"At times it's been hard to separate out the practical enthusiasm for tags and folksonomies (which I share) from the ideological enthusiasm which suggests that tags are the One True Way." Gene Smith
"Are tags useful? Are there any questions you want to ask, or jobs you want to do, where tags are part of the solution, and clearly work better than old-fashioned search? I really want to believe that tagging is big, a game-changer, but the longer I go on asking this question and not getting an answer, the more nervous I get." - Tim Bray
It’s become obvious that tags are useful enough as a place to park search words for pictures & music & other stuff that doesn’t have words to search. Tim Bray
Tag formats: Can’t we all just get along? Matt Linderman
Still, possibly the real problem with folksonomies in not their chaotic tags but that they are trying to serve two masters at once; the personal collection, and the collective collection. - Folksonomies: Tidying up Tags? - Marieke Guy & Emma Tonkin
Easy come, Easy go: Tagsonomies are too flexible for their own good - Journal : MimiYin HierarchyVersusFacetsVersusTags
Various sources including:
(1)Peter Morville's Sorting Out Social Classification
(2) Gene Smith's Sorting Out Social Classification
(3) Thomas Vander Wal Folksonomy: A Wrapper's Delight
(4)Thomas Vander Wal Folksonomy - Online Information 2005
February 13, 2006
Comments:
Advocates of folksonomies frequently echo the statement of David Weinberger,"The old way creates a tree..." In fact, DW is only half right. Library classification has a tree structure, chiefly because a book can be in only one place at a time. Hence, a classification scheme will have a structure like European history -> French history -> French Revolution -> The Terror, etc. HOWEVER, libraries also assign subject headings to materials, and these can be multiple and they are specific. What is striking when looking at a folksonomy like found in FLICKR is the strong pull contributors have to tags that are very general. Supppose you have two photos of the Eiffel Tower. One might have the tags EIFFEL TOWER/PARIS/FRANCE/VACATION/2005/ALICE (maybe Alice is in the foreground). Another photo might have simply FRANCE. What you rarely find is a tag like EIFFEL TOWER. I find this curious and I have no explanation for the behavior.
Post a Comment
# posted by
: 10:55 AM
: 10:55 AM