I say that digital libraries, in order to be relevant to this age, have to be more than just digital manifestations of the content and catalogs from earlier times. If everyone is an author on the web, so is everyone a cataloguer. When the library patr…

The previous entry was about “powerlaws in the use of tags on del.icio.us”. Then at http://del.icio.us/tag/powerlaw, i found Pietro Speroni’s great post Tagclouds and cultural changes that (also) introduces cloudalicious, a one-night project of Terr…

I read the wonderful Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags by Clay Shirky (highly recommended! Read it all!). Near the end, he speaks about “Tag Distributions on del.icio.us” and shows a graph that resembles a powerlaw (even if this…

(”Eat your own dog food” comes to mind…

There seems to be an impulse to frame two methodolgies in an adversarial position when the authentic value lies in identifying how they complement each other. This adversarial framing follows a pretty common trend in the history of ideas: identify one ideology as aligned with a withdrawn elite and the other with a more populist, democratic base. Of course, we all prefer a more democratic approach don’t we?

Some presentations of the tensions between professionally-mediated taxonomies and organic folksonomies follow this rhetorical pattern…and I hope that will fade soon.

In my line of work, healthcare, a mediated taxonomy on content resources is preferred to a more organic, democratic tagging of resources. We just cannot afford the risk of error in this domain. This, of course, does not make us a withdrawn elite, monkishly sitting in rooms and reciting MESH over and over again. We pore over search logs, we interact with people using our resources to find their information, we are self-conscious about our categorization decisions and always check them against less esoteric or technical conceptions….we try to be fair arbiters.

Of course, we may view ourselves as fair arbiters while others view us as protective and paternalist. I think one of the most valuable repercussions of this debate is fostering that self-consciousness in the “well-designed metadata” crowd.

I belive that the apparent contrasts between folksonomists and well-designed taxonomists usually can be traced to a lack of intellectual credit one side gives to the other. A folksonomist may accuse the choice of a controlled taxonomy as being reified and not responsive to user needs. A taxonomist may accuse the choice of an organic folksonomy as unbridled chaos.

I may sound naive, but I view both approaches as tools in my kit whose uses are dependent on context. And I believe most people agree and know this — but it sure is a fun debate to write about!

More about this at http://elliptic.typepad.com

Thanks and sorry about the length.

Eric

While switching RSS feed readers (to NetNewsWire) I thought I’d update the list of RSS feeds that nourish my brain:…

Just after reading tagsonomy, about folksonomies, I came to realize that my blog has the poorest categories possible. Time to…