del.icio.us meta tag

Linda Lane to Mike Crandall
Met with a class member to see if I could get a leg up on your De.li.cious assignment to metatag the MSIM website. What I decided to do is:
1. Take a compilation of all of the MSIM pages - All 97 MSIM URLs:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dvcqpwq_17d4cqn6*

2. then run each of them through the Dublin Core metadata editor engine linked off the DC site, (http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cgi-bin/dcdot.pl)

3. Group the results of each header set into bundles,

4. then enter all of those into del.icio.us

that would be one rather obsessive one way to respond to your assignment, but it would work. In this way it would all be computer generated with the exception of my manual inputs into fields.

There is a manual way to do it, based on the intention of del.icio.us as a more human social tagging viewpoint but I like the first way because it is complete! Please let me know if this is completely off base.

Mike Crandall to Linda Lane
Well, that’s one way to do it, but it wouldn’t satisfy the assignment, because it’s going to take a human to understand how the subjects of the MSIM site can meet audience needs. There is no automatic way to do that, unfortunately, and it takes a great deal of thought and analysis to come up with a reasonable approach.

I’d recommend not wasting your time on the mechanical process and dedicate it instead to thinking about what people who use the site are interested in knowing, and how you might provide metadata that would meet that need. And I would recommend not even thinking about del.icio.us until you’ve finished designing your schema. That is merely a way for you to see it in action and determine if it will work. All the hard work has to be done up front, as with most things worth doing.

My point is that you need to do the intellectual work before you do the mechanical work. And in fact, del.icio.us is only a partially successful tool for displaying your intellectual work because it was not designed to provide the full richness that can be expressed in a fully fleshed out vocabulary system.

Linda Lane to Mike Crandall
Admittedly I have been social tagging in Flickr and on Blogger for a long while - but this seems wildly different to use a social tagging framework to perform organized tagging with others in mind.

Mais oui, I always tagged my own images and blogs with the idea that it was for other people, not for me.

How about if I do an experiment??? - do a little of both and see which one wins? I think the manual one will, but if I do both (and then never follow the links myself) in a year or so we will be able to see which ones other people actually use and that will determine the winner and champion

Mike Crandall to Linda Lane
Exactly the idea of this assignment, Linda. I wanted you to think about what the intersection of an organized tagging system and a freeform one would mean, and what it would look like over time. It’s somewhat of a social experiment as well—I don’t know if you’ve discovered it yet, but past cohorts have done a tremendous amount of tagging in del.icio.us, and I’m curious about how this grows over time as subsequent classes come along (also interested to see how many people actually discover and use previous tags).

*from a script created by Brian Dorsey