The Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology has a special section on Folksonomies in the October / November 2007 issue. It contains the following articles:
- Introduction: Folksonomies and Image Tagging: Seeing the Future? by Diane Neal, Guest Editor
- Does a nice job of providing an overview of the topic, including making reference to a number of libraries that are using tagging at some level.
- Why Are They Tagging, and Why Do We Want Them To? by P. Jason Morrison
- Trouble in Paradise: Conflict Management and Resolution in Social Classification Environments by Chris Landbeck
- Image Indexing: How Can I Find a Nice Pair of Italian Shoes? by Elaine Ménard
- Flickr Image Tagging: Patterns Made Visible by Joan Beaudoin
I like thinking about tags as a triple: the tag, the thing tagged (picture, website, etc), and the person doing the tagging. With a large collection of these triples, there are all sorts of ways to analyze and traverse the data:
- All tags associated with a given item or a given person.
- All tags in common with a collection of items.
- A tag cloud to shows frequency-of-occurrence of all tags (or all tags from a specific user).
- All items tagged with the same tag as a tag on the current item.
- All items with a shared set of tags (one tag or multiple tags).
- People who use the same tag(s).
- And, of course, traversing a network from tag to person to item to person to tag, all pivoting on one corner of the triple or another.
I learned about this from Christina Pikas. I am on a panel with Jessica Baumgart, Jordan Frank and Kris Liberman at the ASIS&T meeting in Milwaukee on Blogs and Wikis in the Corporate World. The conference is happening now, and the panel is tomorrow (Wednesday) morning.