Group items tagged

World Map of Social Networks

or centuries, the rich and the powerful documented their existence and their status through painted portraits.

Self-portraits can be especially instructive. By showing the artist both as he sees his true self and as he wishes to be seen, self-portraits can at once expose and obscure, clarify and distort.

Today, our self-portraits are democratic and digital; they are crafted from pixels rather than paints. On social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook, our modern self-portraits feature background music, carefully manipulated photographs, stream-of-consciousness musings, and lists of our hobbies and friends.

Despite these individual contributions (which we will revisit in more detail in Section 2), to fully understand tagging systems we believe a holistic approach is necessary. Walker [24] describes tagging as “feral hypertext”, a structure out of control, where the same tag is assigned to different resources with different semantic senses, and thus associates otherwise unrelated resources. However, by considering the entire model, computer systems could make inferences that “domesticate” (to use Walker’s terms) these “feral” tags. For example, tag semantics and synonyms could potentially be inferred by analyzing the structure of the social network, and identifying certain portions of the network that use certain tags for the same resource, or related resources, interchangeably. These tags may be synonymous

Different designs and user incentives can have a major influence on the usefulness of information for various purposes and applications, and in a reciprocal fashion, on how users appropriate and utilize these systems. The design of the system may solicit tagging useful for discovery, retrieval, remembrance, social interaction, or possibly, all of the above

Other likely explanations for the observed correlation between social connection and common tag usage may be found in the descriptive categories of sociolinguistics which studies how different geographic and social formations structure the coherence and diffusion of semantic and syntactic structures in various ”lects” within a larger sociolinguistic system. Some of these example lects include: dialect (a lect used by a geographicallydefined community); sociolect (a lect used by a socially defined community); ethnolect (a lect spoken by a particular ethnic group); ecolect (a lect spoken within a household or family); and idiolect (a lect particular to a certain person). If we conceptualize social tagging systems within the theoretical frame of sociolinguistics, these and other “lects” seem especially applicable to understanding and classifying the apparent isomorphism between social and linguistic structures we observed in Flickr. The structures, changes, and diffusion within and amongst various “lects” in social tagging systems will likely have similar patterns to those found in social network analyses and in sociolinguistic language maps.