Abstract
This paper explores the variety of uses people make of the tagging feature on the photo-sharing site Flickr. The site developers intended uses are primarily to build a taxonomy to make the images on the site easily searchable. Data from examples of Flickr tags and interviews with selected users reveal that some tagging fits with this aim, whilst other uses challenge and subvert the intended uses. Tagging is used to do at least the following: identifying existing information in a photo; adding relevant new information; expressing affective stance towards the images; addressing specific audiences; making unrelated ‘asides’; and for creative play. The discussion is then broadened by examining a dispute between Flickr and its users about changes being made to the site: this act as a ‘telling case’ (Mitchell, 1984) as people articulate what the site enables them to do and what it hinders. The dispute generated a thread of more than 29,000 comments, making a corpus of 1,774,401 words. Using corpus linguistics tools the paper demonstrates how users contribute to curating this site, including their uses of tagging. Steps involved in curating the site are identified, including a focus on verbs of curation. Overall, the paper contributes to the analysis of a set of ‘new’ literacy practices and to understanding digital curation. The methods of the two studies reported here productively combine detailed methods of qualitative research with the breadth of quantitative analysis.
Highlights
This paper explores the range of creative uses people have made of the tagging feature on Flickr over time and the extent to which this can be seen as a shift in power from the site developers to the users
The approach, which involves the analysis of texts and of practices, can best be described as ethnographically informed discourse analysis and the interest in tags is part of a broader study of people’s everyday digital practices. (See Barton & Lee 2013 for further details of the general approach.) In section 3 of this paper the focus turns to an online dispute between the developers of this site and its users, drawing on corpus analysis to understand the dynamics of this dispute and discussing it in terms of a disagreement about the curation of the site
A taxonomy is a classification into categories, usually in areas of scientific expertise such as biology or linguistics
Summary
The first study reported here shows how tags provide a writing space with particular affordances which users build upon. The study discusses people’s purposes when tagging, how tags are used as more than just as parts of a taxonomy or folksonomy and what is lost when discussing tags away from the pages where they are being used. A taxonomy is a classification into categories, usually in areas of scientific expertise such as biology or linguistics. What we see on Flickr is a ‘folksonomy’ where rather than being created by an outside expert, the categories are provided by the users. A key difference between the two is that any search is utilising people’s own words, rather than those imposed by an outside expert.
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