History 513 2007-08 07. Social Search and Folksonomy

31 Oct 2007

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 “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.

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Chun, Susan, Rich Cherry, Doug Hiwiller, Jennifer Trant and Bruce Wyman. “Steve.museum: An Ongoing Experiment in Social Tagging, Folksonomy, and Museums,” Museums and the Web 2006.

Cohen, Daniel J. and Roy Rosenzweig. “Building an Audience,” Digital History. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2005.

Kelly, T. Mills. “Subverting the Archive,” edwired (21 Mar 2006).

Krosski, Ellyssa. “The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging,” Infotangle (7 Dec 2005).

Lanier, Jaron. “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism,” Edge 183 (30 May 2006).

Poe, Marshall. “The Hive,” The Atlantic (Sep 2006).

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Sherman, Chris. “What’s the Big Deal with Social Search?” Search Engine Watch (15 Aug 2006).

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Ugoretz, Joseph. “Three Stars and a Chili Pepper: Social Software, Folksonomy, and User Reviews in the College Context,” Academic Commons (9 Jun 2006).

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Mieszkowski, Katharine. “Steal This Bookmark!” Salon.com (8 Feb 2005).

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Sperberg-McQueen, C. M. “Classification and Its Structures,” in A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

Easy. Experiment with social search. Does social search really make a difference? Take some searches that you’ve already done on Google (or another traditional search engine) and try them on Prefound.com and StumbleUpon. Does one of these work better for you than the other? Does either give you results you hadn’t come across before?

Easy. Tag some useful sources. Sign up for an account at Del.icio.us and tag some online sources that will be useful for your research. What kinds of tags do you find yourself creating: person, location, event, daterange, repository type? Are you trying to be systematic or not? Now look at the tags of some of the users who have also tagged things of interest to you. Does this lead you to resources you hadn’t discovered yet?

Easy. Tags across domains. Different sites allow social bookmarking across different domains. Del.icio.us, for example, is focussed on websites, Flickr on photos, and Technorati on blogs. How do the results differ if you search for the same tag across these different sites? What do you think accounts for the differences that you find?