Folksonomy critique
By sylvie | October 6, 2009
Jack Vinson points to an interesting critique of folksonomies by Tom Reamy. Reamy’s main argument is that the taxonomy that folksonomy enthusiasts like to tear down is actually a strawman (straw taxonomy?) and that there are much better taxonomies available. Reamy also notes that folksonomies aren’t really “onomies” since they are ordered by popularity of tag rather than any relationship between said tags. However, I think you could make a case for emergent relationships - an external representation of how people relate tags based on which ones they co-use to describe various items, though I’m not sure how useful that would be over a large group of people.
In any case, I continue to believe that, from a psychological standpoint, tagging should improve recall over an external taxonomy, since the person is creating the word association in the first case and being imposed a word association in the second. By the way, has anyone done this study?
However, Reamy does make a good case for the use of taxonomies. Perhaps the answer is a combination of both approaches.
Topics: Social Software |
October 14th, 2009 at 6:57
thank god I’m not a psych, and I can just use terms irresponsibly. Our need to validate experience by imposing some organizational structure on it is rather silly. If the term is useful to describe it so that people can use it better, cool, but if…
but whateva! It looks like a cool article (just read the first screen) thanks!
October 14th, 2009 at 7:10
[…] Folksonomy folktales (found via Sylvie’s post) In reviewing articles about folksonomies and taxonomies, I found that while there were some interesting experiments in combining the two, most writings repeated the same myths, folktales and misconceptions. […]