ASIST2008: Tagging as a Communication Device Tagging as a Communication Device: does every tag cloud have a silver lining
[v.v. incomplete notes take at face value and don't attribute malice to poor typing!]

Heather D Pfeiffer (New Mexico State U)
Emma Tonkin (UKOLN, U Bath)
Mark R. Lindner (UIUC)
Margaret E. I. Kipp (LIU)
David R Millen (IBM TJ Watson Research, Cambridge, MA)

HDP-
Tagging as metadata: ontological architecture of tags
Knowledge in language-
knowledge is communicated through syntax (symbols), semantics (meaning), pragmatics (context of usage) – pragmatics is the context of usage

terms are just at the surface, meaning comes from relationships
so can see tags as just syntactic terms that we to apply semantic information to.

asks – do we have a change in language since 1600 (um, yeah, how is that controversial?? what? I either didn’t get her talk or I don’t see why it’s novel)

ET-
Ten minutes of language development
(funny example from “true names” map)
essentialist idea – id concepts, label concepts, id relationships – building a strawman, this is easy
- assumes perfect accuracy in id and labeling
- …
place vs. space, somewhere or with meaning
position vs. location (where you are, where you think you are), physical context, context awareness
concepts – positions, labels – names for positions, agents negotiate labels for shared concepts
sharing – joint or shared attention to a concept
Grounded naming game (steels, Vogt)
joint attention is co-location
with disagreement – resolve who feels stronger, probabilistic decay; voting/majority wins;
these require that you have gone there and discussed it.
can you describe this via a transition matrix – what is the prob that we come to consensus,
is perfect accuracy (she prob means agreement) possible, or desirable?
mechanism to handle change – necessary
if nothing ever changes, then nothing interesting happens – too active lose all consistency – just right
- some level of variation
- looking at measuring degrees of similarity, measures of variation useful for mapping (example how different is ASIST language from ACM from IEEE language?)… apply this to tagging..

(her stuff is always excellent and always too brief!)

DRM-
Patterns of Collaborative tagging in a large organization
del.icio.us – success 2003
corporate versions 2005
- dog ear (his and others) – to market via Lotus
- onomi (2007 – Mitre)

behind the firewall
- can link up to enterprise search

use – goals: find, refind, explore
community browsing
personal search
explicit search

graph # action events vs. percent click through (some evidence of perceived potential utility)
“my tags” – lots of click throughs

examination of groups within IBM
- they compared the use of different groups – which were more similar than different
- unique posters 50% - use as a return on system – contributors/users is that the same across groups
- tags per bookmark- lots more tags for intranet vs internet -- why? they think possibly more heterogeneity within intranet so more things are needed to disambiguate [the explanation I would float would be that a lot of content providers who would use more tags to make sure their stuff is found]
- few, but stable number private tags
- fewer tags for private information

social tagging roles: publishers, evangelists, leaders
interviews with 33 taggers
tags more broadly – in corporate directory, blogs, wikis
roles
- community building
- community seeker
- evangelist – raise visibility of something – to get people who sub to tag to notice your new content, or to be known for a topic
- publisher – to drive traffic to a resource – part of the day job
- small team leader – sharing resources amongst team, tags used by convention, team leaders less active taggers

tag use - intentional and not
tag similarity in use within enterprise – tags you would expect to cluster together, don’t
e-mailed people who used these tags – to ask why word a and not similar word b
- you’re right – it’s arbitrary
- no – heteronyms – they’re different
- composition/decomposition
- preferred usage, a standard in some sense
- to be found by desired audience

list of his related work
“social snippets in expertise search (Shami, Ehrlich, and Millen 2008)

ML (hope he puts notes up, really cool)
Integrating tagging: tagging as integration
in tagging research – very little explicit discussion of view of linguistics
tend to use segregational accounts using classical views

signs product of communication process not vice versa

time key factor - communication integrates past, present, future
constraints – biomechanical (psychological, physiological ), macrosocial, circumstantial (context, activities involved)
coordinating these activities and integrating these activities make communication possible, failures can happen in each
macrosocial – proficiency, practice, conformity (unconscious alignment) – community

Sen et al – tag classes - factual, subjective, personal – movielens – integrated
Kipp – Bopp and Starr – basic function – authors vs. user vs. indexers – assign different terms (he says they are integrating different functions even if same purpose)
context – there is always a task, and time is always an issue, even if not specific enough to warrant a tag
PIM research can also be restated in contextual terms

tagging as integration – individual
communicating with myself in the present, taking into account how he has done so in the past, with expectation of integrating it for future use

community- more macrosocial constraints
individuals in community will be more or less proficient – will conform more or less

MEIK
Communication in Tagging, Collaborative Classification Practices in Social Bookmarking Tools

what constitutes a synonym isn’t the same for all people – some might be ok with collapsing down while others see important differences btwn, for example, cinema and movies
placing a document in context – but not the same context for author and user.

Tagging as PIM
Tagging as communication – not subject tags in particular, like funny, to read… emotional reaction, emotional reaction, reviewing function
Corrado and Moulaison IKSO2008 - difference when tagging for community and tagging for themselves – no real difference

del.icio.us – marjority are subject related but
affective
format
time and task
project
geographic

communication – disagreement in aboutness – can this be more of a discussion of aboutness

in some ways, non-subject tags show more commitment [wonder if she’s looked at the one where you can check read or not]

tags are really time sensitive – engagement with resources

Labels: ASIST2008

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