ASIS&T 2008 - Tagging as a Communication Device: Every tag cloud has a silver lining

Heather D. Pfeiffer is the moderator of the panel.

The panel will present on, and discuss:

• Outcome and processing of tagging
• Relationship of tagging to social networking
• Connection to language and its constructs
• Tag use in Ontology building
  

The panel consists of:
Heather Pfeiffer - New Mexico State University
Emma Tonkin University of Bath
David Millen IBM
Mark Lindner University of Illinois
Margaret Kipp Long Island University

Tagging as Metadata
Heather Pfeiffer
Knowledge in language - explaining how we can community knowledge through Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatic or context.
Syntax and semantics are the two parts of language, where as pragmatic is the use of the language.
Conceptualization of Ontology.
Concepts on the surface are labels or terms.
Underneath have a meaning.
Meaning grows out of the context of how the concepts are used.
relationships are built between concepts.
Building a hierarchical structure called an ontology.
Tags are concepts which need context to have meaning. Do we have a change in our language?
This presentation really did not talk to tagging as metadata, but instead talked to the use of language. Not as much as I would have liked.

Ten minutes of language development
Emma Tonkin

Started by talking to the development of language, looking at the etymology of country names. Village = Canada, Little Venice = Venezuela.
The three step ontology development plan - identify concepts, label the concepts, identify relations, document then use them.
This assumes perfect accuracy in the identification and labeling processes. Realistically, collaborative identifying and discussion something is hard, even something as simple as location.

Labelling locations, some positions are important temporarily or permanently. Place versus space, position versus location.
Simulation design - concepts are physical positions in space, labels are the names for the positions, Agents negotiate labels for shared concepts, sharing.

Example of a pharmacy versus drugstores. Talking towards the differences in languages, the possible ways of naming things, coming to consensus.

Discussed mainly how the language will be different over time, over place and as we change our understanding of the world.

Patterns of Collaborative tagging in a large corporate environment
David Millen

Social bookmarking behind the firewall is different, in that the links are behind a firewall, which can be linked up with enterprise search. This leads to social discovery and search. We believe there will be a difference in use depending on the goal - community browsing, personal search, explicit search.

There are multiple paths to information. Showing how the amount of click through on links, search and so on for tags. Search has a high percentage of click through, as does my tags. Community tags have a lower percentage of tag click through as compared to views.

Focus of this study:three groups - bookmarking behavior over time, different sharing (public versus private), focus on internal versus external. Looking at participation rates showed a continued increase in number of new users, with ~50% of unique posters over time. Unique posters are the number of people adding new terms to the tags versus people using existing tags. So about half the people actually add new items and new tags, the other half just use existing.

More people tag for internal resources, than external resources. They classified tags by topic, content and owner. Each user group used group based tags on both the internet and the intranet. Low percentage of private bookmarks. The private bookmarks had a very low number of tags, while the public bookmarks had a higher, closer to public internet level of tags.

Roles in Social Tagging: Publishers, Evangelists, Leaders.

The emerging role as the evangelist - this is a person who is trying to raise visibility of a topic through the use of tags. A self serving use, to draw attention to their own personal material.

Publishers are using tags to drive traffic to a particular set of resources.

Small team leaders are using tags to share resources within a team, so that the team can find resources. This is an additional, not only, method for doing this and it is done by convention, not thorough system uses.

Tag similarity in use ( within enterprise ) - terms that we expect to cluster together, do not when actually looked at. When they asked users why they used a different term for the tag. People fell into different groups - some agreed they should have used the alternative, some strongly felt that the terms were different, others were using them to drive search results, or they were thinking in terms of future use for finding.

Tagging games used to induce tag creation within the organization. Wordel.net has some interesting tag clouds.

Integrating tagging: tagging as integration
Mark Lindner

Is talking about the difference of linguistics in tagging.
Quick overview of integrationsim.
Community as macrosocial.
Towards integration.
Tagging as integration.
Integrationism.
Theory of linguistics and communication.
Opposed to segregation accounts
Spoke to tagging as a integration process that gives us the ability to bring together language. I did not understand how this presentation fit in with the overall panel.

Communication in Tagging: Collaborative Classification
Margaret Kipp

Tagging as a collaborative classification.
Tagging is often examined as a form of collaborative classification.
Multiple studies have examined the consensus shown by frequency graphs.
Studies have also looked at tagging as a form of user classification.
Or as personal information management.
The majority of tags are subject related. The other tag categories are affective, time and task tags, project tags, conference tags.
Most frequently used non subject related tags are : fun, toread.
Tagging as a discussion of about-ness.
The frequency graphs of tags shows convergence, but detailed examination shows that everyone is using very different tags, with a different sense of agreement.
Tagging is also used as a form of review or criticism. You see tags that are mini one word reviews of the site, like boring, stupid, interesting. This is an interesting use of tags, but is not a good candidate for information retrieval. Mixed with other terms and other uses, they may be more fruitful.

ASIS&T 2008 - Plenary Session

Speakers are Genevieve Bell, Howard Rheingold, Andrew Keen.

Genevieve Bell is an anthropologist who works for Intel, on studies on how people use technology.

The many future of the internet. The intranet is more than just the technology. Democracy, transparency, openness and accessibility of all information are cultural values, but they are not everyone's values - nor are they any one area or locations values. They are unique to the internet.
We are at a pivot point of technology, as it moves off the PC and into the mobile area as well as consoles, and so on. These changes are impacting want can be done, and what we want to do with the internet. Applications are becoming more transacting, not immersive.

Interesting story on internet use in Africa. She spoke to a woman with no power, no PC and no mobile phone who used the internet every day. She had her son come in every morning, tell her about her incoming email and take her outgoing email. He then went and sent the email to her recipients. So even though she never used the internet herself, she uses it daily.
Bulk of the TV viewing on PC is done by women between 25 - 45, not the typical vision of a technology first adopter.

There are a number of examples she gives that demonstrate the new internet. In particular, there are more Chinese people on the net now, than American. This will never change, given birth rates. This means English is no longer the dominate language, which raises questions for translations as well as culture. There is a lot of issues that exist in Chinese and Hindu versus English, particularly as Chinese and Hindu are more poetic languages where words are often used for multiple meanings depending on the context, the simile, or the metaphor. Think Cockney Rhyming slang.
Infrastructure has a extraordinary impact on how people use and experience the internet. With people having the same speed up and down, people tend to submit more and when the speed down is faster than the speed up, people tend to consume more. Gives an example of iPlayer in the UK, which single-handedly degraded the internet for the entire UK due to demand for IP TV from BBC.

Talked to several different cultural clashes over application of technology, who wants to be in the conversation, what the conversation means.

Government, technology, society and religion all intersect in the application of internet and technology.

The things that worry us about technology have changed. We are now more worried about authorship, ownership, reputation, authenticity, access, digital literacy.

First challenge is there may never have been a single internet, but looking forward there are multiple different internets in the future - differentiated by access method, country, desires.

Second challenge is that there are people trying to get unplugged from technology. People consciously choosing to be disconnected.

Howard Rheingold begins the discussion response to Genevieve's presentation. We need to teach our children how to access content, and tell what content is valuable. Knowledge transfer is not about taking notes and spitting the notes back out on the test, but is instead about learning what you need to know to accomplish a task and survive in the world. Note taking doesn't automatically create that knowledge transfer.

Andrew Keen gives a response to Genevieve's presentation. He wonders how Intel wins on the basis of the information she presented. The internet is a philosophical movement. A book by Fred Turner called from Counter culture to cyberspace lays out the philosophical movement of the internet and its ideology.

The internet is not the real world. The real world is increasingly ugly. Battles are brewing on the internet, as an example the Chinese versus English internet. The real world is worse, there are people are losing their lives, losing their freedoms and losing their livelihood in the real world, and the internet is not helping.

Digital Fascism - similar to the industrial revolution, there are people who are disenfranchised by the information revolution. What will happen with these people?