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

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 Middle Earth Icons Tag cloud of web Examples "The Machine is Us/ing Us" Remixing politicians 429D-ADF8-0F56D8A2A763.htmlhttp:// 429D-ADF8-0F56D8A2A763.html Sunday 2C4684DBF20A.htmlhttp:// 2C4684DBF20A.html Postsecret remixed MOVIES NEW VIDEO sites make it easy – can download youtube movies (on class wiki) and remix without software (remix), automtically or by hand. E.g.

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 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. =UTF8 =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 site. For a summary of the controversy, see:

ACADEMIC VERSIONS – of folksonomies, tagging systems and social bookmarking are emerging. Harvard Playlists & “H20” Social bookmarking 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.” DC7A2A3B78BAE3D32F Everybody playing Tag?

Playing Tag PENNTAGS PROJECT 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. Some Doctors use tag clouds to aggregate what is being posted on medical blogs: blogosphere-tag-cloud.htmlhttp://kidneynotes.blogspot.com/2005/09/medical- blogosphere-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” Many news media sites provide tag clouds as news ways of accessing their information in new ways. cloud (New York Times tagcloud) cloud But – see against word clouds,

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.)

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? A few questions to consider

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. Far East, Middle East, Near East 2. Mr, Mrs, Miss, Ms. 3. Negro, Black, African American 4. 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 trans- cultural.

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?