The Berkman Center has a lunchtime speaker every Tuesday, and this week it’s my turn. I’m talking about — guess what? — taxonomies and tags. It’s an informal venue, and with luck I’ll be interrupted after ten minutes, but I need to have a full talk prepared, just in case. I’ve been having trouble structuring it. Here are the notes I have so far. Comments? Criticisms? Rude suggestions?

Why Tags Matter

I want to talk about three ways tags matter.

If necessary: Brief explanation of tags. Show del.icio.us and Flickr. [Yes, I’m confident Berkpeople know what tags are, but these talks draw a broader audience.]

First, tags may not matter:

We’re in an early adopter phase. Historically, people have resisted adding metadata to objects.

Why is there such enthusiasm now? A. We get individual value from tagging.
B. No one is telling us to do it or how to do it.

First reason: Aristotle

For Aristotle, to be is to be a type of thing. Types = categories. He gave us genus-species definitions: X is a type of P and is different from other members of P. I.e., X is what it is because of the category it’s in.

Atistotle’s implications/assumptions:

Knowledge and world are one

Categories are defined by principles (e.g., “rational animal”): These principles are rational, can be known by experts who have authority, exist independent of our awareness, and are precise. (Every member of a category is an equally good example of that category.)

Aristotle’s principles of organization come from how we organize physical things in the real world: Lumping and splitting. So, ideas are assumed to be subject to the same limitations as physical things: X can only be “shelved” in one spot at a time. (Law of Identity — ((A=A) and ~(A = ~A)) — becomes true for ideas as well as for physical objects.)

Challenges to Aristotle:

Postmodernism (brief!): Disputes that categories are independent of us and are rational. Points to relation of knowledge, authority and power.

Eleanor Rosch: Not all members of a category are equally good examples. Her theory of classification by prototype. Prototype classification says our conceptual organization is far fuzzier and messier than Aristotle thought.

Tagging: Categories are driven by convenience not principle, are relative and relevant to the individual, and are non-authoritative

Lack of special status for author’s own tags indicates just how non-authoritative tagging is

Why does disputing Aristotle matter? Aristotelianism affects us when we think of the world as something that starts with definitions, that consists of topics that persist through history, that enable domain-specific authority.

Second reason: Nature of topics

Frank Miksa, professor at the University of Texas, Austin: We all tend to believe that “there exists a realm of knowledge that grows through individual contributions and is transmitted from generation to generation such that its existence is thought to be continuous and is capable of being examined.”

Example of the breakdown of that idea: Wikipedia

Topics are whatever someone is interested in, so long as it can be verified

450,000 entries in English so far (60,000 in Encyc. Britannica)

Categories (like tags) are assigned by readers. Hierarchy also. E.g., Tori Amos is a top-level category because someone assigned her sub-categories. This isn’t a statement about what’s important but about how to make it easy to find the new Tori Amos CD.

Topics are becoming more like interests than self-standing, transgenerational slots. Also, finer-grained.

Third reason: Re-meaning

We have been born into taxonomies. Now we’re making our own. It’s messy, but, well, so are we.

The fact that the basic principles of taxonomies — lumping and splitting — have reflected physical limitations means that our alienation from categories is an alienation from the physical world??

Most exciting thing: We don’t know where this is going. A new infrastructure of human meaning. What will emerge?

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