Abstracts Schizoanalysis as Metamodeling

s Schizoanalysis as Metamodeling Janell Watson Plastic Super Models: Aesthetics, Architecture and the Model of Emergence Pia Ednie-Brown Regaining Weaver and Shannon Gary Genosko On Transmission: A Metamethodological Analysis (after Régis Debray) Steven Maras Toward an Ontology of Mutual Recursion: Models, Mind and Media Mat Wall-Smith Print this article Tag-elese or The Language of Tags Jan Simons Universiteit van Amsterdam Folksonomies as chaotic systems The core "meme" of Web 2.0 from which almost all other memes radiated was: 'You control your own data' (O'Reilly, 2005, 3). [1] Key instruments for this user control are tagging systems that allow users to freely assign keywords of their own choosing to Internet resources of their own making as well as to documents produced by others. Tags are used for making Internet resources retrievable for personal use, but in so-called social networks tags are also accessible for others. Of course, as freely chosen keywords tags do not necessarily follow prefixed taxonomies or classification systems. But going by the maxim that interaction creates similarity and similarity creates interaction, the idea or hope is, however, that the tagging practices of individual users will eventually converge into an emergent common vocabulary or folksonomy. (Merholz, 2004; Shirky, 2005; Vander Wal, 2005b; Mika, 2007). [2] It is far from clear, however, that free tagging systems will eventually yield controlled vocabularies, since different users apply keywords in very different ways and the choices users make are always influenced by many and very different factors. Most often mentioned in the literature are the design of a tagging system, the incentives for users to tag resources, the purposes for which users tag resources, and the nature of the tagged object (Vander Wall, 2005b; Marlow et al, 2006; Golder & Huberman, 2006). These and possibly still other dimensions are as many incentives for idiosyncratic, ambiguous, and inconsistent uses of tags. Therefore many researchers recommend to curb or channel the choices of individual taggers by eventually offering only the most popular tags as options to choose from (Merholz, 2004), or by designing supportive tagging systems that suggest the use of some tags rather than others. Left to themselves, free tagging systems seem to be too wild and too chaotic for any order to emerge. But are these free tagging systems really as "feral" as they seem to be, or do they only look uncontrolled because one has been looking for order in the wrong place? What follows is the result of what new media practitioners like to call "rapid prototyping". By way of a proof of concept , I have done a quick-and-dirty analysis of Flickr's tag cloud. The concept was: if folksonomies encourage users to tap into their own vernacular, everyday natural language must somehow "guide" the tagging practices of users of tagging systems. Flickr was choosen because it offers a "narrow" and "blind" tagging system that only allows owners to tag their pictures and does not come up with recommended tags (like Del.ic.ious, for instance), and because Flickr presents its visitors with a tag cloud in which the hundred and fifty most popular tags are listed. Moreover, Flickr also offers clusters in which the tags from the tag cloud co-occur with other, often less popular tags. Flickr, that is, has been so kind as to do a lot of preliminary work for this rapid research project. This also means, however, that the choice of Flickr was partly arbitrary: if not Flickr but another "social site" had offered such a wonderful tagging system, that other site would have been choosen. Flickr's tag cloud, then, has been choosen because it may teach us something about tagging systems and folksonomies, and not or not primarily because of what tags may tell us about pictures. http://journal.fibreculture. org/issue12/issue12_simons. html (1 of 18) [6-7-2009 17:44:41] Fibreculture Journal Issue 12 The Models and Politics of Mobile Media Gerard Goggin Tag-elese or The Language of Tags Jan Simons Who’s Afraid of Technological Determinism? Another Look at Medium Theory