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Folksonomies
After doing the readings for this week I found the article by Quintarelli to stand out in my mind the most- the reason being that he makes some very bold statements about folksonomies that I think are exaggerated. I think he makes some good points as well, but I have a problem with him saying that folksonomies are the result of what he calls “bottom-up consensus” and that they are moving away from hierarchies. From my understanding of the term “consensus”, I think it would be more appropriate to use the word “democratic”. It’s two different things to say that a tag is agreed upon by the community (consensus) opposed to saying that it is accepted by the majority of the community (democratic). Although the difference is subtle they both imply different systems. In consensus minorities have more equal power with the majority because individuals can veto, where in democratic systems it is the majority that has the most power. I do agree that folksonomies allow people to classify their own information using their own metadata and that agreed upon classification schemes can emerge if enough people use the same tags that are more relevant to them than rigidly structured classification systems that are imposed by "experts".
Quintarelli also put a lot of emphasis on the idea that folksonomies destroy hierarchies which Kome has shown in his paper is not entirely true. And are hierarchies really that complex? If I have a bunch of websites bookmarked about yoga and I tag some of the with yoga and teachers, hatha, hot, Nicki Doane, ashtanga- is that really difficult to understand and too much work to do? Nope, but it is a hierarchy- just a really simple one. But, I think the point is that mosting tagging applications do not impose these hierarchies on others- so people can see my websites tagged with "ashtanga" without finding the ones about "yoga" first- which is pretty cool.
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I think you raise an interesting issue with the democratic vs consensus terminology. I'm not too clear on the subtleties of difference between them - but this issue draws attention to the fact that we need to study how exactly terminology/tags become "popular" - how do people make decisions on which tags to use or not use? does looking at the tags of others actually have a huge impact? is it a good/bad thing if people are impacted by the tags of others? some of the authors did seem to think that it was a bad thing, suggesting that tagging is "repeated and amplified non-expert input" (from Lawley's article) - a statement that did surprise me a bit as it suggests that tagging might not be effective for certain purposes.
Hi Amy,
I agree with Aysha that you raise a really interesting point about the difference between the terms "democratic" and "consensus." I hadn't thought about tagging in this light before. I agree that tagging is definitely democratic but not necessarily agreed upon by the community. I also like your point that tagging doesn't impose hierarchies on others.
I like your distinction between democracy and consensus here, Amy. I guess for me, it would be difficult for tags to ever be run on a consensus simply because there could be a dissenter for virtually any tag, except the most obvious ones. For me, if tags are going to be useful, they to have enough breadth that users "on the fringe" can also find works "on the fringe". For instance, if I'm looking for something with a WWII setting and someone vetos the term WWII for a certain book because it's a time setting with no huge impact on the overall story of the book, than that result would not show up in my tag search.
I'm not sure if I'm being entirely clear here as it's difficult to explain what I'm getting at, but, basically, different people will see different things in materials and without that wider vision, some angles will be missing. :) That's one thing I really like about tags, they're perhaps the least one-side biased method we have to categorize materials: simply because the more voices we have, the more biases we can have access too.
Phew...
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