History 9808 2008-09 05. Social Search and Folksonomy

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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.

Bearman, David and Jennifer Trant. “Social Terminology Enhancement through Vernacular Engagement: Exploring Collaborative Annotation to Encourage Interaction with Museum Collections,” D-Lib Magazine 11, no. 9 (Sep 2005).

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).

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

Shirky, Clay. “Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links and Tags,” Clay Shirky’s Writings about the Internet (Mar-Apr 2005).

Sterling, Bruce. “Order Out of Chaos,” Wired 13, no. 4 (Apr 2005).

Tonkin, Emma. “Folksonomies: The Fall and Rise of Plain-Text Tagging,” Ariadne Magazine 47 (Apr 2006).