Wednesday 4 August 2010

Folksonomy

What was once claimed "a new approach to [online] categorization" (Pink, 2005), might help my project. Tagging by users, for example on Flickr, allows searches to retrieve a particular categories of photos. Although some say people are not categorizing information, but "throwing words out there for their own use", the system produces a self-organized classification of digital material online. Whilst other people can examine and label your photos, and "is idiosyncratic rather than systematic" which sacrifices "perfection" to lower the barrier to entry.
"Officials from the Guggenheim, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and a half-dozen other establishments are taking a folksonomic approach to their online collections by allowing patrons to supplement the specialized lexicon of curators". (Pink, 2005)
Pink, D.H. (2005) Folksonomy. [Online] http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/magazine/11ideas1-21.html?_r=3 [04/08/2010]