What do I think about tagging and folksonomies? I'm of two minds about it. When I originally heard about it, I though "Great! No more cookery!" On the whole, I think it's common sense to let people label things in the language they use. However, I haven't been so very impressed with it in practice. For example, I looked at some of the titles users had tagged at Ann Arbor. The first, The Da Vinci Code, was tagged, among other things, "Mary Magalene." Now, this should be great--Mary Magdalene is not one of the LC Subject headings and might be a useful point of access. Unfortunately, for those of us who use the more traditional spelling "Mary Magdalene," it doesn't do any good.
One of the articles we read noted that tagging works best when a lot of people tag the same item, and this seems like a good example. If 100 people tagged The Da Vinci Code, surely some of them would come up with Mary Magdalene. It might also take care of one of the other problems of tagging--that nobody calls anything by the same name. On LibraryThing, the book Soon I Will Be Invincible is tagged "genre:scifi," "Sci-Fi," and "Science Fiction" (and, mysteriously, "gaiman"). The more people tag a thing, the better chance you have of someone tagging it what you would think to look for it under.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment