Abstract
This article discusses the information representation process based on the Moscovici's Social Representation Theory and domain analysis in Information Science. The aim was to identify mechanisms and constituent dimensions of social representation in collaborative tagging systems/social bookmarking systems. Scientific knowledge was defined as the object/phenomenon of representation in these systems; and the tag as the shareable structure of meaning that connects participants and resources. The empirical research involved descriptive statistical techniques applied to a corpora of tags available in CiteULike, which is a social tagging system developed for the academic community. The data analysis, performed in a sample of groups derived from the dataset, showed that the users' reuse of their own tags resembles the anchorage mechanism. The reuse of tags by other participants - in the same group - reveals some evidence of the objectification mechanism. Some speculation arose about the cognitive effort made by the individual, under group influence, with regard to the tagging activity, user's choice of resources, and sharing styles. Further studies on social bookmarking systems depend both on a "gain scale" of users and items tagged, requiring techniques and procedures redesigned by Information Science, Statistics, Network Analysis, Linguistics/Sociolinguistics and Social Psychology.
Highlights
This article discusses the information representation process based on the Moscovici’s Social Representation Theory and domain analysis in Information Science
A set of applications - known as collaborative tagging systems or social bookmarking systems - aim to stimulate a “shared” effort to find and tag items in a joint collection of resources
By including SRT to the discussions related to social tagging systems, three premises have been established: 1) a given individual/user, who has his own reference framework, assumes a dynamic and dialectical relationship with the group she/he is involved with through the tagging activity; 2) by adopting a social software, an individual conveys elements and dimensions
Summary
With regard to the roles of information sharing undertaken by individuals, Talja (2002) divides the academic community into four groups - super-sharers,. 1978; Alves-Mazzotti, 1994, Santos, 1994): sustained by the social/group rules, both from an a) Information: is related to the organization, quantity and quality of knowledge that a group has about an object; b) Field of representation: refers to the idea of an image, a social model, and a concrete and limited body objective and subjective standpoint of the “object” (Moscovici, 1978) Such reference framework and group rules underpin the two fundamental mechanisms of SRT: anchoring and objectification. In tag per resource/item and per user From those sets of fact, there is a correspondence between the most lines, the ones that had the following contents were frequently used words of a language and the core themes inferred from the figurative nucleus, which establishes a relationship between the language and the social representation. Range of users and respective groups: Total and percentage (2006-Mar/2012)
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