Return to UWO History 9808A Digital History Fall 2009
Social Search and Folksonomy (21 Oct 2009)
Tagging (aka social bookmarking) allows users to label digital objects in ways that are meaningful to them and accessible to other users, creating a bottom-up, anarchic form of categorization that Thomas Vander Wal described as "![[WWW]](http://wikispot.org/wiki/eggheadbeta/img/sycamore-www.png){kind=small}
folksonomy." Once limited to sites like Del.icio.us and Flickr, tags have now moved into the mainstream and are being used in some online museums and archives.
Readings for Discussion
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Chun, Cherry, Hiwiller, Trant and Wyman, "
Steve.museum: An Ongoing Experiment in Social Tagging, Folksonomy, and Museums," Museums and the Web 2006.
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Cohen and Rosenzweig, "
Building an Audience," Digital History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2005.
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Gralla, "Ch 13 How Newsgroups Work (Ch 16 7th ed.)"
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Kelly, "
Subverting the Archive," edwired (21 Mar 2006).
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Krosski, "
The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging," Infotangle (7 Dec 2005).
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Lanier, "
Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism," Edge 183 (30 May 2006).
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Nowviskie, "
Collex: Facets, Folksonomy, and Fashioning the Remixable web," Digital Humanities (2007).
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Poe, "
Fight Bad History with Good, or, Why Historians Must Get on the Web Now," Historically Speaking 10, no. 2 (2009): 22-23.
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Sterling, "
Order Out of Chaos," Wired 13, no. 4 (Apr 2005).
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Welie, "
Faceted Navigation" Welie.com: Patterns in Interaction Design (2008).
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Wichowski, "
Survival of the fittest tag: Folksonomies, findability, and the evolution of information organization," First Monday 14 no 5 (4 May 2009).
Background Readings
Assignment
Add some form to your content. In the last assignment, you created a basic personal web page using HTML. We didn't worry too much about the formatting, because one of the central ideas of the digital humanities is to try to separate form from content wherever possible. Now that you have the content for your web page, however, you can worry about the form. Start by working through the W3 Schools CSS tutorial. When you are finished, edit your index.html file to read from an external style file called style.css, then edit the style.css file to create styles that make your web page look the way you want. If you get very ambitious, you might try working with floating elements. See the Floatutorial for more information. (N.B. This is strictly optional). As before, e-mail me your index.html and style.css files when you are finished working on them.
