17th Annual ASIS&T SIG/CR Classification Research Workshop

Saturday, November 4, 2006 -- Austin, TX

CALL FOR PAPERS -- abstracts due JUNE 1, 2006

SOCIAL CLASSIFICATION: PANACEA OR PANDORA?

The aims of this year's Classification Research Workshop 
are to provide a forum for researchers, practitioners, and 
users to share their knowledge, perspectives, and opinions 
on social classification (SC), and (in the form of the 
proceedings) to make a lasting and authoritative 
contribution to our understanding of the benefits that 
SC-based systems may provide. Papers on any aspect of the 
conceptualization and/or evaluation of social 
classification are invited for presentation at the 
workshop and publication in the open-access, peer-reviewed 
proceedings.

Social classification is a convenient, generic label that 
may be used to refer to any of a number of broadly related 
processes by which the resources in a collection are 
categorized by multiple people over an ongoing period, 
with the potential result that any given resource will 
come to be represented by a set of labels or descriptors 
that have been generated by different people. The specific 
processes in question include indexing, tagging, 
bookmarking, annotation, and description of kinds that may 
be characterized as collaborative, cooperative, 
distributed, dynamic, community-based, folksonomic, 
wikified, democratic, user-assigned, or user-generated. 
The mid-2000s have seen rapid growth in levels of interest 
in these kinds of technique for generating descriptions of 
resources for the purposes of discovery, access, and 
retrieval. Systems that provide automated support for 
social classification may be implemented at low cost, and 
are perceived to contribute to the democratization of 
classification by empowering people, who might otherwise 
remain strictly consumers of information, to become 
information producers.

Efforts to conduct serious evaluations of the comparative 
effectiveness of such systems have begun, but results are 
scattered and piecemeal. Compared with retrieval systems 
based on traditional methods -- manual or automatic -- of 
classifying resources, how effectively are users of 
SC-based systems able to find the resources that they 
want? What is the impact on retrieval effectiveness of 
systems designers' decisions to pay limited attention to 
traditionally important components such as vocabulary 
control, facet analysis, and systematic hierarchical 
arrangement? Current implementations of SC tend to shy 
away, for instance, from imposing the kind of vocabulary 
control on which classification schemes and thesauri are 
conventionally founded: proponents argue that social 
classifiers should be free, as far as possible, to supply 
precisely those class labels that they believe will be 
useful to searchers in the future, whether or not those 
labels have proven useful in the past. But do the 
advantages that are potentially to be gained from allowing 
classifiers free rein in the choice of labels outweigh 
those that may be obtainable by imposing some form of 
vocabulary and authority control, by offering 
browsing-based interfaces to hierarchically structured 
vocabularies, by establishing and complying with policies 
for the specificity and exhaustivity of sets of labels, 
and/or by other devices that are designed to improve 
classifier--searcher consistency?

Other questions arise as a result of the reliance of 
SC-based systems on volunteer labor. Given the distributed 
nature of SC, for example, how can it be ensured that 
every resource attracts a critical mass of descriptors, 
rather than just the potentially-quirky choices of a small 
number of volunteers? Given the self-selection of 
classifiers, how can it be ensured that they are motivated 
to supply class labels that they would expect other 
searchers to use? In general, are reductions in the costs 
of classification (borne by information producers) 
achieved only at the expense of increases in the costs of 
resource discovery (borne by consumers)?

Abstracts (500-1000 words) of papers should be submitted 
to both workshop co-chairs by JUNE 1, 2006.

Authors will be notified of the program committee's 
decision by JULY 1, 2006.

Full papers (3000-5000 words) should be submitted to both 
workshop co-chairs by SEPTEMBER 1, 2006.

The workshop will be held on NOVEMBER 4, 2006, as part of 
the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information 
Science and Technology (ASIS&T) in Austin, TX. It will be 
the 17th in a series of annual workshops organized by 
ASIS&T's Special Interest Group on Classification Research 
(SIG/CR). Please see 
http://www.asis.org/Conferences/AM06/am06call.html for 
further general information about the ASIS&T Annual 
Meeting, and 
http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~klabarre/SIGCR.html for 
further information about SIG/CR.

Workshop co-chairs:

Jonathan Furner (furner at gseis dot ucla dot edu)
Associate Professor, Graduate School of Education and 
Information Studies, University of California, Los 
Angeles, CA

Joseph Tennis (jtennis at interchange dot ubc dot ca)
Assistant Professor, School of Library, Archival and 
Information Studies, University of British Columbia, 
Vancouver, BC