DIGC101 Lecture

FOLKSONOMY

A system of taxonomy (classification) based on the collaborative production of “tags”.

Made up of two key words- FOLK and TAXONOMY.

Labelling and tagging of images.

A tag: piece of information/ identifier. An act of ownership over a physical location over a specific time or place that is otherwise meaningless for those that have no connection to the image.

METADATA

  • Data that describes data.
  • Audio, text, images etc.
  • For location by browsing or searching.
  • Eg: Title, date, author, day it was created, PROPERTIES.

TAXONOMY

  • Scientific taxonomies
  • Folk Taxonomies
  • A scientific practice of classification.
  • Traditional taxonomy: the tree structure.
    • Start with a spider, leads to species, leads to characteristics etc.
    • An order of a parent and child relationship between a type of information and sub types of information.
    • Structural relationships between parent and child.
    • Form of organistation of knowledge. Comes with it’s own rules and restrictions.
    • Parent is always at the top, is the root of the information.

FOLK TAXONOMIES

  • Employs the tree like structure for the organisation of knowledge.
  • But connects to a specific culture/ specific place in time.

FOLK/ FOLKSONOMY

  • No parent/ child relationship in a Folksonomy
  • No strict rules in the ordering and tagging of information
  • It doesn’t refer to any specific class, and talks about purely online activity.
  • For the regular user.
  • The ordering and labelling of knowledge is something that everyone does unconsciously.
  • Surowieki Wisdom of Crowds 2004 examins aggregation of information by groups. The collective aggregation of the information by users is better, more exhaustive and more useful than what governments can achieve BUT has limitations.

LIMITATIONS

·        Lack of controlled vocabulary

·        People who enjoy the social aspect of the system will gravitate to the more popular tags, or can use the obscure tags.

·        Rely on trust

·        Depend on the user tagging accurately and widely

·        The user must navigate themselves.

·        Structure less. (The Flickr cloud)

·        A horseless carriage: the means of transportation without defining the system.

“The wisdom of crowds used to organise stuff”