Ana,

I am very interested in tagging, not so much generally, but from a specific
viewpoint. I am an independent adviser and developer working in the
corporate information space, i.e. not LIS but rather the main corpus of
corporate operational information and knowledge - documents, records,
content, knowledge - with a view to helping organizations apply the
principles of knowledge architecture to organize these disparate resources,
make them easier to find and to use, and thereby contribute to improved
organizational performance.

My specific interest in tagging is as a device for monitoring the evolution
of concepts and their linguistic labels 'in the field', and in using the
information gleaned to keep controlled vocabularies up-to-date. I suspect
that there is an overlap here with social network analysis (SNA) and that a
study combining tagging and SNA would provide some interesting insights.
However, I have not had time to develop this thinking, and neither do I have
the resources required (no students, no staff :-)).

I am very interested in following any study you decide to undertake. If you
think I might be able to contribute in an way, then you are most welcome to
contact me.

Regards,

Bob

Principal Associate
InfoPlex Associates, UK
www.infoplex-uk.com




-----Original Message-----
From: DCMI Social Tagging Community
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Ana Alice Baptista
Sent: 15 January 2007 21:07
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Call for participation in a study on tag usage


Dear all,


Liddy and I have been talking about doing a study on how people use tags.

It is obvious that some tags are used as values to the "subject"
element. But it seems that people are using it in several different
ways. We have seen some testimonials here in this list that point in
that direction.

I, for instance, use them as a value for "subject", but also to
characterize the resource in terms of quality (good, fair, bad...) and
depth (general/detailed view...).

Other persons use tags as if they were metadata elements, e.g. "for:"
(the audience element), "who:" (for photos, who is in the photo).

So, we are looking for people that would like to participate in this
study, or that have students wanting to participate. It would be a
collaborative effort. Liddy suggested to have a paper for DC-2007 as a goal.

If you want or have students wanting to participate, please email me or
Liddy so that we can coordinate efforts and define the methodology (that
will depend on the number of interested people).

Best regards,

Ana