upon tags and tagging
tags aka keywords
I'm not sure why tags came into being - maybe keyword is too librarianly, whereas a tag, it's got street cred, a tag is someone's byword, their acronym, their nom de plume, or nom de guerre, a tag is also what hangs off something in a shop, the tag bears the price, this is this, a shirt, that's what it looks like but it is also $45 or $245 or whatever
a shirt can't have a keyword, but it can have a tag, a photo couldn't really have a keyword, but it can have a tag, etc
adding tags yourself, you don't have to wait for the librarian or the information specialist to tag for you, to categorise for you, you do it yourself, you self-ethnographize (!)
like Cass and I tagging the dog "dog" so that we knew that it was the dog, the idea coming, perhaps, from that part in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "100 Years of Solitude" where the people write labels on the walls and the furniture and so on because they've been awake for so long, the insomnia plague, that they can no longer remember what anything is. So that Edie/Eddie is a dog, and she is also labelled "dog", so what does this "dog" do? see, this is what she does . . . and you have a look at the thing labelled dog, and you can see that that is what it does,
so,
if I make a tag called tag, and then write about it, and get Cass to put up the photo labelled tag, and link to that etc, then we are exhibiting the type of thing that it is . . . and what it does and how we can use it,
and,
I am still a little bit unclear about how the whole thing works: because the photograph in Flickr is tagged 'tag', and because my blog post is tagged 'tag' and because I've started a collection of links at del.icio.us tagged 'tag' then they can all join together and be displayed at technorati, and then a RSS created for them, and that can be pumped out at Bloglines (I think). And more importantly, all of the people who're interested in 'tag' can look for it, if they've got the right type of equipment, and understand how to do it, I think it is to do with things being written with XML
(Malfi is sleeping and snarling, a new tag, 'sleep_snarl', if I took a picture I could tag it that way.)
making connections - what does it rely upon? knowing the keywords, knowing what people call things, but as you investigate the context, become buried in it, you get to know what a thing might be called or what an interesting line of investigation might be,
so,
for people who speak English it is kind of easy, as long as you can work out the context, and for people who speak other languages, and are interested and involved in the context, eg programmers, can pick out the words that they're interested in, and people that speak completely different languages, eg English speakers who're not into programming can follow along and find completely different sets of information, and for us, the people that only speak and read one alphabet, we can't do arabic, or chinese, or korean, then we are stuck with one path
if I made the label/tag 'sleep_snarl' then I could find the picture again later, to compare with other 'sleep_snarl' pictures, so what this depends on is being able to see the label/tags as you do the tagging, and on being able to find my tags again later. What categories do I already have, and is this a new category, and should I put this thing here? I wonder over time if the categories will shift . . . that is, if a thing labelled truck will go on to be labelled lorry later on, but that is okay, because it shows layering of names and of usage, so it's like the OED and the way that it tells you the first known English usage of a word, like serendipity, being a word made up by * from a story about Serendip.
the problem also is having the little bit of code handy to use so that you can make the tag . . . maybe that could go in a blogging template? ah ha!
tags: tag, sleep_snarl, dog
I'm not sure why tags came into being - maybe keyword is too librarianly, whereas a tag, it's got street cred, a tag is someone's byword, their acronym, their nom de plume, or nom de guerre, a tag is also what hangs off something in a shop, the tag bears the price, this is this, a shirt, that's what it looks like but it is also $45 or $245 or whatever
a shirt can't have a keyword, but it can have a tag, a photo couldn't really have a keyword, but it can have a tag, etc
adding tags yourself, you don't have to wait for the librarian or the information specialist to tag for you, to categorise for you, you do it yourself, you self-ethnographize (!)
like Cass and I tagging the dog "dog" so that we knew that it was the dog, the idea coming, perhaps, from that part in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "100 Years of Solitude" where the people write labels on the walls and the furniture and so on because they've been awake for so long, the insomnia plague, that they can no longer remember what anything is. So that Edie/Eddie is a dog, and she is also labelled "dog", so what does this "dog" do? see, this is what she does . . . and you have a look at the thing labelled dog, and you can see that that is what it does,
so,
if I make a tag called tag, and then write about it, and get Cass to put up the photo labelled tag, and link to that etc, then we are exhibiting the type of thing that it is . . . and what it does and how we can use it,
and,
I am still a little bit unclear about how the whole thing works: because the photograph in Flickr is tagged 'tag', and because my blog post is tagged 'tag' and because I've started a collection of links at del.icio.us tagged 'tag' then they can all join together and be displayed at technorati, and then a RSS created for them, and that can be pumped out at Bloglines (I think). And more importantly, all of the people who're interested in 'tag' can look for it, if they've got the right type of equipment, and understand how to do it, I think it is to do with things being written with XML
(Malfi is sleeping and snarling, a new tag, 'sleep_snarl', if I took a picture I could tag it that way.)
making connections - what does it rely upon? knowing the keywords, knowing what people call things, but as you investigate the context, become buried in it, you get to know what a thing might be called or what an interesting line of investigation might be,
so,
for people who speak English it is kind of easy, as long as you can work out the context, and for people who speak other languages, and are interested and involved in the context, eg programmers, can pick out the words that they're interested in, and people that speak completely different languages, eg English speakers who're not into programming can follow along and find completely different sets of information, and for us, the people that only speak and read one alphabet, we can't do arabic, or chinese, or korean, then we are stuck with one path
if I made the label/tag 'sleep_snarl' then I could find the picture again later, to compare with other 'sleep_snarl' pictures, so what this depends on is being able to see the label/tags as you do the tagging, and on being able to find my tags again later. What categories do I already have, and is this a new category, and should I put this thing here? I wonder over time if the categories will shift . . . that is, if a thing labelled truck will go on to be labelled lorry later on, but that is okay, because it shows layering of names and of usage, so it's like the OED and the way that it tells you the first known English usage of a word, like serendipity, being a word made up by * from a story about Serendip.
the problem also is having the little bit of code handy to use so that you can make the tag . . . maybe that could go in a blogging template? ah ha!
tags: tag, sleep_snarl, dog
posted by lynn at 9:55 am
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