Mejias, U.A. (2004). Bookmark, Classify and Share: A mini-ethnography of social practices in a distributed classification community.

This paper refers to the process of associating freely chosen tags with content which is referred to as “distributed classification”. The objective is to provide some perspective regarding the social dynamics that emerge through using these distributed systems in order to better understand how distributed classification influences personal and social aspects of knowledge and digital construction of meaning.

My thesis is that a better of understanding of how users perceive these systems, and how they interact with each other through them, can provide us with important insights about individual as well as social processes of knowledge and meaning construction online.

Research Questions

How is meaning created in the distributed classification system through the social sharing of bookmarks?
How is knowledge collectively structured by the use of tags?
What social conventions emerge through the use of the distributed classification system?

Methodology
del.icio.us site with people tagging ‘ccte’ special tag
CCTE DR web portal to del.icio.us environment

Participants
6 (including himself)

Quantititative Data Collection Strategies
* data logs analysis (e.g. most popular tags, total items submitted)
* tag use analysis (e.g. frequency of tags, what tags used)

Qualitative Data Collection Strategies
* informal interviews over time (e.g. benefits, difficulties, desired features to enhance social interaction)

Findings
1. How is knowledge collectively structured by the use of tags?
* social and educational technologies were shared most using the ccte tag
* common themes reflected the Web (e.g. blog)

2. What social conventions emerge through the use of the distributed classification system?
* found that del.icio.us extended “notes” field was used as a communication broadcast tool for the CCTE community (e.g. “Did anyone attend this event?”)
* participants express desire for system features (e.g. comments for posts) that weren’t currently available
* examples provided that system was not useful to operate (e.g. try and give up)
* examples of “lurking” behaviour within public space while looking for new stuff

3. How is meaning created in the distributed classification system through the social sharing of bookmarks?
* people had difficulty in making the conceptual leap between the rigid, formal taxonomy that were used to and the flexible, informal taxonomy that were attempting to use with del.icio.us (e.g. many expressed a desire to have the ability to organise via categories in some fashion)
* Mejias (2004) believes that these findings suggest that people have difficulty letting go of established forms of taxonomies

These findings may suggest that users want some degree of a controlled system such as being provided with a set of tags via a drop down menu or some formality as suggested by the quote “the free tagging feature is too free”

* exploration of system by participants provided the opportunity for the discovery of new features and an awareness of the greater potential of these systems

Conclusions:
* hard to conceptually switch from taxonomy (e.g. fixed, categories) to folksonomy (flexible, tags)
* freedom to create personal and social metadata structures may be percieved as chaotic
* benefits emerge as users become more comfortable/aware of system functionality and limitations

* belief that more thinking needs to address how to get novice users to become aware of the advantages of distributed classification systems

Thesis Relevance: An early tagging paper. Essential reading for lit review.

Technorati Tags: , ,