Right now, I’m less concerned about my own tags than I am about how different users’ tags “talk” to one another. I am wary of honing mine too much because I’ve never found any system of classification to catch adequately the “granularity of things” — and sooner or later the process breaks down precisely because the granularity of things asserts itself (an act of mercy) and refuses to fit the schema.
In fact, when I’m trying to find something, some piece of information, an idea, etc, part of the process of remembering why the thing or idea or article mattered to me in the first place lies in retracing the sometimes obscure path I took to tag it as I did. So: del.icio.us — cityofsound’s piece about the book on London that I just snucked away there, is it best tagged with ‘London’ or ‘urban’, or as a ‘review’ (which it isn’t, in the formal sense that I had in mind when I first coined this tag, yet it does review it)? And to tag it with another already-in-place option, ‘cultural history’, means in my rattlebag of tags that it ends up in the same tagged category as academic historical works — which is “wrong”, but in fact highly suggestive, making me wonder what are the fundamental differences between an academic work about London in the ‘50s and Dan Hill’s reaction in 2005 to Colin MacInnes’ novel, published in the 50s, about London … in the 50s. (And now I come to think about it, why didn’t I tag it ‘literature’? What was I thinking about when I read cityofsound’s posting? Why, London, in the 50s. But could I teach this book, as a novel? And there I go, touching up the tagging — ‘literature’, ‘novel’ — because that is how I’m now looking at the book.)
Before I owned a computer, or ever dreamed of that day, I once photocopied and filed an article on European witchcraft. I was working on Macbeth and the scholarly paper was germane to my work. Some weeks later, I went to find it and the afternoon developed into one of those two hour stretches of time when you’re hunting high and low, looking in my case in files dedicated to Shakespeare, files on Macbeth, files to do with the class I was teaching it to. No luck. Only after all that time had passed did I stumble upon a new file I had created, labelled … ‘Witchcraft’. I had been very systematic, and it hadn’t helped me. Now, in the digital era, it’s no trouble at all to tag an item several times over — Shakespeare, witchcraft, Macbeth, European witch craze … Association+digitilisation is a wonderful thing and today I could find that paper pretty quickly. If MacInnes’ book wasn’t tagged by me with ‘novel’, then let’s try ‘London’ … or ‘urban’ or ‘50s’ or … I don’t need to try to be scrupulously systematic, though clearly I shouldn’t aim to trip myself up and eccentrically tag things about London with ‘Singapore’.
For all these reasons, and many more, I like the “amateurishness” of the tagging found on Flickr, del.icio.us and now (to come) Audioscrobbler. The problem is then finding the “same” thing through someone else’s tags … Flickr’s tag-suggestions (find all photos tagged ‘London’ and you get also: related — ‘england’, ‘tube’, ‘architecture’; + see also, ‘art’, ‘night’, ‘thames’, ‘uk’, ‘graffiti’, ‘bridge’, ‘tate’, ‘underground’, ‘sign’, ‘train’, ‘building’) seems particularly well-written and productive/creative.
Now, if we had Taggle , with a Flickr-like algorithmic engine to it …
[cityofsound’s post was tagged (with a revisit/revision) as, ‘books’ ‘reviews’ ‘London’ ‘cultural_history’ ‘literature’]
