[ur brain on compUtrs]

In the Sunday Times Magazine this weekend there was a feature by John Cornwell: "It's a No Brainer." The article gave an overview of Professor Susan Greenfield's latest research findings detailing the effects of extended computer use on young people's brains.

According to Cornwell, Greenfield is predicting a "nobody scenario" in which teens of tomorrow won't have a secure/stable sense of personal identity (which means lack of morality and inability to think about effect of actions).

"By spending inordinate quantities of time in the interactive, virtual, two-dimensional, cyberspace realms of the screen...the brains of the youth of today are headed for a drastic alterations. It's as if all that young grey cortical matter is being scalded and defoliated by a kind of cognitive Agent Organge, depriving them of moral agency, imagination and awareness of consequences."

Greenfield draws parallels between the degeneration of an Alzheimer's brain and "the implications of these newer threats." For Greenfield (via Cornwell) too much IT (from 6-9 hours a day...ah! sounds like me!) means brains develop differently: "The brain has plasticity: it is exquisitely malleable, and a significant alteration in our environment and behaviour has consequences."

Thanks to the "substitution of virtual experience for real encounters, the impact of spoon-fed menu options as opposed to free-ranging inquiry, a decline in linguistic and visual imagination, and atrophy of creativity, ccontracted, brutalised text-messagine, lacking the verbs and conditional structures essential for complext thinking" ..."the more we play games, the less time there is for learning specific facts and working out how those facts relate to each other." the result: "a failure to build highly personalise individual conceptual freamworks..."

I'm not sure about the seemingly sweeping negativity. Sure computers have changed/added to the ways we communicate but young people especially are still in school all day - there *must* be at least some real-life contact during those hours. A decline in linguistic imagination? I think text messaging is all about imagination rather than a "brutalised" form of language, this is a craft - a different kind of language for a specific purpose (only 140 characters to say what you mean). Sounds like the creation of a kind of code. But more research needs to be conducted before anyone can say exactly what changes are occuring and how parents/educators/society should (or should not) accommodate them. (See Charles Leadbeater: "But the reality is that most young people seem to see it as a way to participate and collaborate, socialise and express themselves.")

Interestingly, the print version of the Times' article has various brain photos but the accompanying online version does not. The images included in the print article are from the Science Photo Library which also has these amazing views of the brain speaking, hearing words and reading words:





As an aside to the article content (science, brain research, teens) the writing style of Cornwell suggests his own kind of ludditism...an inappropriate gendered kind. Baroness Susan Greenfield (Director of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, Fullerian Professor of Physiology, Senior Research Fellow Lincoln College, Honorary Fellow, St. Hilda's College) is described as "the motormouth publicist of science" whose "lower lip pouts as if to blow a raspberry." She is also a "glamourpuss" (though at least an "academic" one). We are told about her "bust up with her Oxford-don husband" and then treated to Cornwell's interpretation of her accoutrements: "she, in laboratory mode, is dressed down in a beautifully cut Russian-red jacket; a sleeveless, artificial-fur-lined silvery waistcoat; charcoal Armani trousers; a fetching beret (hint of Rasta-chic); and patent platform lace-up ankle boots." Further in the article, Cornwell describes Greenfield's "tight-fitting grey-blue trouser suit" she wears to a Birmingham lecture. Just one question: had the scientist been male, would Cornwell similarly draw focus to his "pouting" lips, eyes and clothes?

[railcard renewal]

well...I tried to renew my railcard online this morning...seems the railcard people aren't quite digitally literate...

[energy and sunset]

a view from my brother's house in toronto:

[toronto]

[social media: metrics and analysis]

As we gear up for the upcoming (June) NLab conference on Social Networks and Business I'm more than ever on the prowl for interesting posts/tweets/rss updates that tackle these issues. (nb: find NLab on facebook and upcoming) I've just come across Ryan MacMillan's (a digital marketing consultancy) "Contagious Report" on social media, methods and metrics.

Some interesting parts:

"The four qualities of Social Capital The similarity to economic capital only goes so far. SC has the following four qualities:
Utility through Accumulation: Like economic capital, the more SC an individual accumulates, the more easily that individual is able to affect their environment.
Inequality of Distribution: Like economic capital, SC is differently available. Some individuals have a lot,others less.
Expiration through Under-Use: Unlike economic capital, which expires through over-use, SC expires through under-use. 'Use it or lose it'.
Based Upon Trust: Regular capital is merely the exchange of agreed values as
guaranteed by a central authority. SC, however, is a stockpile of trust, which is
guaranteed only by the exercise of reciprocal actions between
diffuse individuals within a social network."

"Measuring Social Capital Any planned social media activity by a brand within an OSN must be measurable by the way in which it increases or depletes the brand's SC. Measuring a brand's SC, particularly in reference to their online SC, can be
achieved through analysis of online sentiment and influence.This in effect is a measure of the 'tone of voice' that online conversations about a brand have. Sentiment metrics describe the level of the 'stockpile' of trust which constitutes SC: how trustworthy is the brand understood to be, and how useful or desirable is its
content or activity?

Influence metrics describe the efficacy with which a brand is able to make use of that trust in order to (positively) affect their environment: how easily is a brand able to share its knowledge around its social networks?"

Read the whole report here.

[a million penguins: change and order in a wiki novel]

This afternoon Dr. Bruce Mason shared with us some of his indepth research on the joint Penguin/DMU creation (some call it a wikinovel) A Million Penguins...there are some notes I jotted down by pen (imagine...a pen and paper...)


guiding research questions:

1. what was the role of the discussion around the wiki?
2. what patterns of social behaviour occured among the contributors?

There is loads of commentary (on and offline) about A Million Penguins and most of it is negative...I wonder if most of this has to do with the way A Million Penguins was described...a mean, equating it with a "novel" is bound to cause reactionary behaviour. A collaboratively created multiple wiki cannot be a novel...perhaps it can have narrative aspects but a novel...maybe if it was initially described as a wiki experiment rather than a novelistic one the initial feedback/response would have been more positive?

Bruce mentions in wiki lore there is the garden metaphor however Penguins isn't really about order/organisation.

In 5 weeks of the wiki-story:
1500 registered users
over 11000 edits
75000 visitors
280000 page views (!!! good marketing!)

since it was closed down (no more edits/additions allowed) there have been a further half a million page views.

Different types of users:
Performer
Vandal
Gardener

• the performer made 1780 edits in 4 weeks (he didn't register in the first week)
• focused on adding content and linking together - bringing himself to the front
• edits frequently viewed pages (so others can always see him)

• the vandal was about destruction through changing text - a type of performer who also foregrounds him (or her) self
• the edits were all about her/him
• 166 edits so one of the least frequent however the most frequently talked about and instigated the most contributions and began patterns of behaviour (inspired similar kinds of vandalisation)

• the gardener focuses on organizing
• made 1144 edits, the 2nd most frequent
• made person-to-person edits (more private)

More stats:

650 pages with significant content

366 don't contain any links 9dead ends)

150 pages don't have any incoming links (orphans)

Thus - a lack of "wikification" because pages are not linked, walled gardens which only link to themselves (like a high-school clique?)

Bruce suggests that the kind of negative behaviour (vandalism etc...) might be explained if we think of the wiki as a Bakhtinian "carnival":

"gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies,it buries and revives"

there is a kind of social sanctioning for bad behaviour and two normes are reversed:

the reversal of normal rules of wiki
the reversal of normal rules of wiring/publishing

see the wikipedia entry

See Bruce's report for more indepth information and (sometimes hilarious!) examples coming tomorrow here.

[exploring a million penguins - order and chaos in a wiki novel]

@ the IOCT on 23 April 2008

presenter: Bruce Mason

In February 2007, DMU and Penguin Publishing collaborated to host the world’s first wiki novel - “A Million Penguins” - using the same software that runs Wikipedia. Over a five week period nearly 1,500 people signed up to edit the novel, over 11,000 edits were made and it was viewed over 500,000 times leading the CEO over Penguin Publishing to muse that it was maybe the “most written novel in history.”

In this seminar, Bruce Mason will outline the results of a research project held at the Institute Of Creative Technologies (IOCT) which investigated the social behaviour that unfolded during the writing of “A Million Penguins.” What kinds of collaboration, conflict and compromise occurred and what did it tell us about future online writing possibilities? Did a sense of community arise or did we see nothing but chaos and vandalism?

The seminar will not require any particular knowledge of wikis or online writing.

About the presenter
Bruce Mason is an IOCT Post-Doctoral Research Fellow specialising in social research and web2.0 activities. He previously worked at DMU with Professor Sue Thomas on an Arts and Humanities Research Council Funded Project (http://www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/tnn/) that investigated the potential for folksonomy in academic research.

About A Million Penguins
A Million Penguins is a collaborative online novel, a wiki which was open to anyone in the world to write and edit. The project ran from 1st Feb to 7th March 2007, was organised by Kate Pullinger (http://www.katepullinger.com) of De Montfort University and Jeremy Ettinghausen of Penguin, with Sue Thomas, Professor of New Media at De Montfort and an editorial team of students enrolled on De Montfort’s Online MA in Creative Writing and New Media.

[definition: digital literacy]

"The potential integration of texts, images and sounds in the same system, interacting from multiple points, in chosen time [real or delayed] along a global network, in conditions of open and affordable access, does fundamentally change the character of communication."

From The Network Society, by Manuel Castells

[blogging and literary analysis]

Via John Timmer at Ars Technica

"The rise of blogging clearly represents a significant social phenomenon, but studying it poses a challenge in part because defining a blog is not a simple thing. There have been a number of attempts to do so at the technical level, where the presence of material organized by time stamp or the existence of RSS feeds have been suggested as defining features. A group at the University of California-Irvine, however, decided to approach the question from the perspective of human-computer interactions, where the humans involved were blog readers. Mixing in a dose of literary theory provided some interesting insights into how readers view and define blogs.

The idea borrowed from HCI studies was a simple one: perform observations of actual users as they are interfacing with their computers. The observations took the forms of usage surveys, overseen reading sessions, individual discussions, and a single group discussion. Unfortunately, given the time-intensive nature of the work, the study population was small (20 subjects), and several of them did not participate in all aspects of the study. Attempts to log browsing habits didn't work out; the survey population was either savvy enough about privacy concerns to not install the logging software, or not savvy enough to manage a functional installation.

Still, the researchers were able to generate information about how readers interact with blog material. They argue that this can be as important as having information about the blogs themselves, citing the development of reader response theory in literary criticism. As applied to blogs, they state, "the reality and meaning of a blog exists neither solely in the blog itself nor solely in the reader, but rather in the reader’s active interpretation of, and interaction with, the blog."

What they found is that reading blogs has become a habit integrated into Internet use for many people, akin to instinctively checking e-mail. Several of the blog readers described it as simply a way to pass the time, using terms like "wasting time" and "doing nothing." One of them described it in terms of addiction: "I don’t really look forward to cigarettes anymore, but it's something that happens through the course of the day that I feel like I might need to do. It just becomes habit, I guess."

Given that attitude, a few of the other findings aren't much of a surprise. For one, the temporal structure of a blog is only important due to the role it plays in where stories appear on screen. People will tend to read the top ones first, and browse deeper only if they have time—if they don't, the deeper stories generally don't get read. A product of this is that few of the blog readers felt their habits contributed to a sense of information overload.

Despite this casual approach to content, blog readers take a number of aspects of the content very seriously. One example of this dichotomy is that a reader that can't be bothered to search for new blogs beyond the ones he currently reads, but still engages in offline activities based on what he's seen in the ones he does read.

One key feature for most users was a sense of community. Even though blogging is an inherently one-to-many activity, most readers felt a personal connection to the author. This could foster the feeling that the reader belonged to the community even in the absence of participation, and led those who did participate via comments to agonize over their content. Only one of the study participants said they enjoyed triggering flame wars; most of the others felt their comments were a form of appreciation for the blog author, and worked hard to make them insightful and cogent.

This produced a distinction between smaller blog communities and popular, news-focused blogs. These didn't produce the same sense of belonging, and readers tended to focus more on their content than their community. That result suggests that the blogging community will always have a long tail, as readers search for smaller places where they can continue to find a sense of connection with the authors.

The study's authors kindly provided Ars with a copy. It was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's CHI Conference, and is available through their website."

[blog portfolio]

I've been thinking about other ways to use blogs in the classroom - other than as a way of getting students to participate, answer/ask questions, review books/lectures etc... I've just seen Kim Middleton's idea for a blog portfolio:

"The portfolio should consist of three parts:

1) A numbered list of all of your blog posts, with titles and dates of the post.

2) a numbered list of all of your comments with the title of the post on which you commented, the name of the person’s blog to whom it was posted, and the date.

3) A short (5-7 page) reflective essay based on your posts and comments.

What kind of a reflective essay, you ask? Your reflective essay assignment is designed to surface and articulate what you’ve learned over the course of the semester by looking back on and analyzing your own writing during this time. Your essay should answer the question: how have I learned to situate myself as a reader/writer/English student/literary type (pick one or more of these) in the information age?

To answer this, your primary texts should be the writing that you’ve done over the course of the semester—I’m particularly interested in your posts and comments, but your drafts, your expertise projects, etc. are fair game. With the above question in mind, read back over your writing and locate particular sentences and passages that attest to your learning. In your paper, you’ll quote these and analyze them. In what ways do they show what and how your ideas have changed? What terms, concepts, and phrases provide evidence of the complex ways that your thinking has progressed and shifted over the course of the semester? How do they provide evidence that you can use to answer the questions above? Essentially, you’re going to close read your own writing for evidence of how you’ve come to terms with the ideas we’ve discussed in class. I’m looking for a deep engagement with your own writing here.

You may, of course, use the “I” voice in your paper—in fact, you must! Please provide an introduction that contains your main idea(s)—you should be able to make an argument about where you are now and how you got there, with reference to particular terms that you see yourself working with throughout the course of the semester. You may feel free to use a chronological approach (ex., “when I first started this class, I thought digital culture was ____. My first blog post contains this comment: “______.” Here, you can see the ways that I was dedicated to x idea. All I could associate with that x idea was___. In a blog post three weeks later, however, there is a marked shift in my language and tone. “______.”). You may also choose a different kind of structure if it makes sense to you (you could arrange it by theme: “these three quotes show the ways that my thinking changed about digital culture. These two show the ways that I am a writer that needs a number of drafts to shape a complicated argument”.)"

Jeremy Hiebert's model of an e-portfolio though over two years old will serve an a helpful visual model of what students will be working on:

Why create an e-portfolio? Well it helps students:

1. document the journeys of preservice teachers

2. promote or market preservice teachers for employment

3. guide them toward meeting the requirements of certification programs.

(see New Literacies)

[critical and digital literacy]

via Thinking 2.0:

"Helping students take control of their own learning is one of the most important challenges facing teachers. The (inquiry or constructivist) approach is based on providing students with opportunities to formulate their own research and create “artifacts” or “products” that demonstrate their understanding and skill development. However, it often becomes glaringly obvious that “research” to many students involves taking the information from the first couple of web sites that appear from a google search, cobbling it together and “voila” - there it is. This is a long way from the goal of students as knowledge “producers”. Teaching students how to evaluate the reliability of information remains one of the most important literacy skills.
The Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus site is useful to show just how easily students can be manipulated by a professional “looking” web site.

AfterEd Video(Teachers’ College, Columbia University) discusses the importance of providing students with “educated guidance on how to use new media” and helps debunk the assumption that buying lots of computer hardware will meet students’ 21st century literacy needs.
Some key “critical literacy” questions it advocates include:How was this text contructed?What are its underlying values?What are the conventions it uses?Who is the intended audience?Who owns and who benefits from this?

Video via: Multiliteracies

This Department of Education Tasmania site also has activities and work samples "

[MEDS 2009 lecture: new media new identities]

Questions posed to the class during the lecture to be answered in the comments:

Search YouTube for the tag "Leicester" - How many videos appear?
Find an image on Flickr that reflects an aspect of your identity and post the url of the image in the comments
Tweet your answer to this question: "what do you think of using Twitter in this class?"

Watch: Social Networking for Parents

UPDATE: Thanks to all the MEDS 2009 students for your participation...even in the terribly hot lab!

[superfast internet]

From the Times

"The internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.
At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.
The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.
David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.
The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day - the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.

[...]

That network, in effect a parallel internet, is now built, using fibre optic cables
that run from Cern to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East,
Europe and around the world. One terminates at the Rutherford Appleton
laboratory at Harwell in Oxfordshire. From each centre, further connections
radiate out to a host of other research institutions using existing high-speed
academic networks. It means Britain alone has 8,000 servers on the grid
system – so that any student or academic will theoretically be able to hook up
to the grid rather than the internet from this autumn.

[...]

“Holographic video conferencing is not that far away. Online gaming could evolve to include many thousands of people, and social networking could become the main way we
communicate."

[knowledge representation: tagging, folksonomy, content, information, literacy]

Claudia Cragg was going to interview me about tagging for her Creative Writing and New Media Master's project...sadly (and super annoyingly) my mic. didn't seem to work for skype today. So, we're going to go all social media with this interview and I'm going to post Claudia's questions here, with my answers, for any of you who might be interested in my views on tagging and folksonomy and digital literacy and and and...

So, here goes (caveat - my personal opinions!):


Who came up with the term Folksonomy and how is it defined?

Thomas Vander Wal came up with it during an e-mail list conversation in 2004.

As the name suggests, it's a taxonomy made by the folks – user generated definitions and information structures. But folksonomy is just a part of a larger idea: tagging. Tagging is the tying of words to objects. I think Vander Wall explains that this method of tagging has less "cognitive load" for users because it’s about key words rather than some kind of overlying systemic planning. I see it more of a free–form way of categorising information – personalising it.

Folksonomy is a subset of tagging – identifying/categorising for personal use, “re–finding” information

Has it caught on as a term?

Yes! Just do a google search for folksonomy; there are 1,620,000 hits (at 15:07 GMT). But then, I suppose just because it has "caught on" doesn't make it any less fractious. I'm thinking of "web 2.0" and how it is bandied around...still lots of problematising. I'm remembering Cory Doctorow's "metacrap" and I think a lot of people still don't quite "trust" the folks...that's why users concerned with retrieving the "right" kind of information might trust certain folks whose ideas they value...a kind of filtering through the (*wisdom* of the) masses.

What, in your academic opinion, makes a good or bad Tag Cloud? (i.e. your thoughts on Anatomy of a Tag Cloud vocalized)

Hrm...good question. Firstly, a caveat: there can be no *exact* laws or rules about good/bad tag clouds because the tags/vocab and value are constantly changing - a punctuated equilibrium.

For me, a good tag cloud makes information accessible to those who are interested in it. Tag clouds with a gazillion different terms look "messy" to me. A pet peeve is the inclusion of spam in tag clouds - that just changes the whole positive participatory idea behind folksonomy. Also, if taggers use a lot of similar words (as I did when I first started tagging) like: blogger, blog, blogging, blogs - that just adds to the mess. I guess rules are necessary, figure out if you're going to stick to uppercase or lowercase and whether you'll use singular or plural terms (blog or blogs? FirstName or firstname?)

Look at TechCrunch's tag cloud courtesy of technorati:

Most of the terms are of a similar size which makes spotting information trickier (at least for me) and there is some html included which shouldn't be there...so it seems messy.

A good tag cloud is "tidy" with (seemingly) transparent access to information. I don't want to be left wondering how the "blogger" and "blogging" tags are different and whether I should bother clicking both tags...I want the story (or most of it anyway) there in the cloud. I just want the general overview (I always look first for the tags that are weighed heaviest and then move to those tags least used), it's up to each tagger to make things more precise/personal to them. It's a vocabulary that's constantly evolving.


By the way, there are loads of tools out there to create tag clouds of your site (rather than of your delicious - or similar - bookmarks).

I've just used TagCrowd to make a cloud of my current blog which lists my last 10 posts:



How can Tag Clouds be used to drive traffic to a site?

In terms of general business use – there is huge potential here especially for smaller to medium size companies.

I think tagging can help with “findability” of company information although perhaps not so great with emergent vocab. which keeps changing. Also, I guess there might be a need to compare internal tags (tagged by employees) with external tags (tagged by customers) as each might have different words for the same or similar ideas.

But, as with peppering content with keywords, you can make sure you tag specific blog posts etc...with key words that you know your customers will search for.

Plus, the easier it is for customers to navigate a site, the more chance they’ll come back and using a tag cloud is, I think, a good way of making visible an overview of company info.


Tagging can also be a chance for any company (or organisation or university group etc...) to popularise their key word/s (or coin one) while simultaneously making data cohesive. Before we started using delicious there was no "nlab" as a bookmark, but now it is there and it means conference-goers and other interested parties can follow what NLab has been up to for the last 2.5 years. Shirky suggests that a refined approach to this kind of group classification is the next "big frontier."

I wonder how many tags there were for "longtail" before Shirky's article or for "web2.0" before frames of reference changed and people took to O'Reilly's coinage? (See Michael Wexler's 3 part series "I Hate Tags")

"In reality, our understanding of things changes and so do the terms we use to
describe them. How do I solve that in this open system? Do I have to go back and
change all my tags? What about other people’s tags? Do I have to keep in mind
all the variations on tags that reflect people’s different understanding of the
topics?"

If tagging is about naming/defining/narrativising content, then tag clouds aggregate content. Businesses can use this information in numerous ways, a few initial thoughts: establish a new market/audience, create a (new?) community interested in the same (or similar) things, get to know (on a deeper level) the needs of your customers and by having "tidy" tag cloud businesses are able to provide that much-called-for "transparency."

For example, a company can get an rss feed of a certain term and then track its usage (there are 190,688 photos tagged with "ipod" on flickr).

How are they best structured as 'jumping off points for dialogue'?

I think it's more about it's use-value. There isn't a "best structure" for dialogue but perhaps there are rules/strategies for certain kinds of dialogues. Two key words: tag clouds can refine conversations: they are "specialised" and can become (I'm optimistic) more "sophisticated."

As for jumping off points - tag clouds always already offer serendipity not structure (other than in the most general and probably ephemeral sense). I think when Will Richardson quotes Bruce Sterling who quotes Stowe Boyd (structure? what structure?) what he is saying can also apply to the role of tag clouds in dialogue:

"Basically, conversation is moving from a very static and slow form of
conversation — the comments thread on blog posts — to a more dynamic and fast
form of conversation: into the flow in Twitter, Friendfeed, and others. I think
this directionality may be like a law of the universe: conversation moves to
where is is most social…The way I am getting tugged to blog posts is
increasingly as a mention within a conversational bite in Twitter or Friendfeed.
I then click out of the flow to see the larger post, and offer my view in the
flow — not on the blog — and then I return to the flow, where I will be spending
most of my time. This makes sense: I want to talk about the blog post with the
person who brought it to my attention, more so that with some group of strangers
at the blog, or even the author, who I may not know at all. I also don’t think
we can expect the fragmentation of the social experience to slow down: it will
get a lot worse before it gets better."

Yes, tag clouds are dynamic and (should) reflect changing ideas and changing communication and people are probably drawn to tag clouds/taggers who offer valuable information but, in the end, it IS about communication.

What can be learned from their early use in Flickr for those wishing to use them in a more strictly narrative context - should there be distinctions between the types of clouds for predominantly textual content?

At the outset when tagging was new and etiquette hadn't yet entered the scene, I think people used as many tags as they could to classify something, trying to be as open as possible. but as the use has focused so have the terms and we see people (look at delicious) using a handful of tags to describe their bookmarks instead of trying to be all encompassing

I think clouds evolve according to the information so they’re kind self–aggregating or self–describing as the info changes so I don’t think you really need a distinction between types of clouds – i think that’ll be apparent to users.

Look at the flickr tag cloud from Jan. 2007 that I included in my "Anatomy of a Tag Cloud" post and look at the current flickr tag cloud (these are both for the "all time most popular tags"):

key tags for '07 were: wedding, party, japan, friends, family, travel, london

but today look how "France" has appeared as a tag and "band". Also, both flickr tag clouds have the term "girl" but neither have "boy."

However, both clouds have the tag "me." Isn't that an answer there - tagging isn't about structure; it's all about "me"!

Do Tag Clouds in any way alter the reception of text by a reader and if so how?

I think there is an interesting difference between people who tag for themselves and those who tag for others – when there’s a clearer idea of the subject the tagging is much more concise. Readers of tag clouds might judge a site by it's cloud (judge a book by its cover?)...and come to the site with the knowledge of the value of a site or of a tag (depending on weight and size of font etc...).

I wonder whether the tags imbue readers with a certain kind of passivity or...gee, not quite sure of the word...some kind of awareness of their role as reader rather than creator? I'm wondering this because the flickr tags seem to be mostly descriptors...where are the verbs? If readers were guided by tag clouds/tags that were active (running, reading, creating, see, listen, looking) that must surely change the perception/reception of any ensuing text/story/media? I think it's about different kinds of readers and contexts (what are you searching for and why) as well as different literacies.

See Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach's tactical or strategic view:

In what other ways have Tag Clouds evolved and how do you think they might evolve in the future?

Have a look at Philipp Keller's tag history:

and read Vander Wall's own rationalising of the state of tagging.

My thoughts on the future of tagging...hrm...I think there is going to be a visual tagging service. I’m thinking of the new visual search engine that I’m beta testing (searchme.com) and I think we’ll start seeing visual tags and maybe sonic tags. Besides the richer interfaces and applications

As an educator, I'd like to see tag clouds used as a mode of assessment. I'm thinking of Janet Harris's use of Tag Crowd to analyse the MSNBC Democratic debate:

(aside: isn't there loads of interesting stuff here...note who is the only person to mention women...hrm...also note the use of "America" but one candidate chooses only to say American, keeping it more personal?)

We could generate tag clouds (of work that is handed in electronically) of the student's most-used words. Wouldn't that be a good way of showing students why it's necessary to avoid repetition if they can actually *see* the repetition? We could also use tag clouds for our lecture notes or powerpoint presentations etc...to help students get an overview of the key points we're trying to share with them. What about generating tag clouds of 18th C. lit. and current lit. to see how vocabulary changes? When I taught a media module last term we looked at the supposed *neutrality* of reporters...but we could generate tag clouds for each reporter and compare how they write about different news items as well as compare what reporter A and report B say on news item C. hrm...seems lots of possibilities here. But, that age-old question arises... critical/digital/transliteracy: how do we *teach* students how to adequately *read* tag clouds.






buttons found at haveyouseenthisgirl on flickr.