VocabControl

I’m still mulling over Helen Longino’s criteria for objectivity in scientific enquiry (see previous post: Science as Social Knowledge) and it occurred to me that folksonomies are not really open and democratic, but are actually obscure and impenetrable. The “viewpoint” of any given folksonomy might be an averaged out majority consensus or some other way of aggregating tags might have been used, and so you can’t tell if it is skewed by a numerically small but prolifically tagging group. This is the point Judith Simon made in relation to ratings and review software systems at the ISKO conference, but it seems to me the problem for folksonomies is even worse, because of the echo chamber effect of people amplifying popular tags. Without some way of showing who is tagging what and why, the viewpoint expressed in the folksonomy is a mystery. This is not necessarily the case, but I think you’d need to collect huge amounts of data from every tagger, then database it along with the tags, then run all sorts of analyses and publish them in order to show the background assumptions driving the majority tags.

If the folksonomic tags don’t help you find things, who could you complain to? How do you work out whether it doesn’t help you because you are a minority, or for some other reason? With a taxonomy, the structure is open - you may not like it but you can see what it is - and there will usually be someone “in charge” who you can challenge and criticise if you think your perspective has been overlooked. In many case the process of construction will be known too. I don’t see an obvious way of challenging or criticising a folksonomy in this way, so presumably it fails Longino’s criteria for objectivity.

You can just stick your own tags into a folksonomy and use them yourself so there is some trace of your viewpoint in there, but if the rest of the folksonomy doesn’t help you search, that means you can only find things once you have tagged them yourself, which would presumably rule out large content repositories. So, you have to learn and live with the imposed system - just like with a taxonomy - but it’s never quite clear exactly what that system is.

I’ve been mulling over what to say about CMS Watch’s “Taxonomies are Dead” teaser, but defer to Patrick Lambe of Green Chameleon, who has written a very good post in response: Organising Knowledge » What Are We?.

One thought of my own is that there seems to be increasing differentiation between taxonomy creators and implementers (which I take as a sign that taxonomies are thriving rather than dying). I’ve always been on the content side of things, so I see knowledge organisation as primary, and the technology you use as secondary. However, more and more it seems to be the case that people understand the word “taxonomist” to mean someone who is a sort of Sharepoint sysadmin.

Spacefem.com: Dewey Decimal System Meme. Some seasonal silliness!

via Impressions Scholarcast.

Here’s mine:

I read a copy of The Future of Information Architecture: Conceiving a Better Way to Understand Taxonomy, Network and Intelligence because I couldn’t resist the title, but was left utterly baffled by the book. The author appears to have taught at some US universities, but no biography was provided and the preface declared that due to the “political incorrectness” of his ideas, no institution or establishment had supported him in writing and publishing the book. Nevertheless, he seems to have produced quite a few books over the last few years. The publisher, Chandos Press, apparently printed the book directly from camera ready copy supplied by the author.

He writes in an extremely dense and academic style using phrases like “existential dialectics” and “post-human post-civilization”. I usually pride myself on being able to “translate” philosophy into “normal” English, but could not work out what was going on. The gist seemed to be a description of taxonomies and networks in terms of six “principles” (opposites such as simplicity/complexity, order/chaos) and I had expected some kind of conclusion to draw these principles into a proposition. Instead, he suggested that there were many more principles that could be used.

From the title I had hoped for some predictions about how IA might develop under the influence of social media or cloud computing etc., but there was nothing like that in the book. Instead, there were some statements about post-human evolution and the impossibility of predicting what IA will be like when we cease to be humans and become “free floating consciousnesses”.

Reuters Wants The World To Be Tagged. This article on the ReadWrite Web blog is about the new API (does anyone else pronounce this “appy”?) sent out into the world by Reuters. They are hoping it will encourage tagging of articles in a way they can then harvest. It sounds like it is fairly basic at the moment - it is only recognising a few bits and pieces like people and places. It would be interesting to see how well it does with people like Jack London and places like Congo (Brazzaville) and Congo (Kinshasa). When I worked on a similar project we had lots of problems disambiguating the Guineas (Papua New, Equatorial, etc) and Salvadors (El or San) in particular. I assume they have lots of authority files backed up by rules that will sort all those out. It would be nice to see “under the bonnet” as it were!

I had a very interesting conversation with Vikram from infoMENTUM - The Enterprise Content Management Services team the other day. He has been working with complex taxonomies in large organisations for several years and was kind enough to pass on some very handy tricks of the trade. He is an advocate of relational taxonomies, particularly for global organisations who need to have one unified “corporate voice” but also need flexibility and localisation to serve the differing needs of particular regions and communities.

Research Methods in Information by Alison Jane Pickard (2007–Facet publishing), is a worthy reference tome covering topics from the various research paradigms through to how to present a dissertation. It reads primarily as a textbook for students, but would be a handy resource for anyone new to research.

A bizarre classification game from the University of Montreal. There are some wonderfully inventive classifications that make mine look really unimaginative!