Social tagging: A new perspective on textual ‘aboutness’

Kehoe, Andrew and Gee, Matt (2011) Social tagging: A new perspective on textual ‘aboutness’. Studies in Variation, Contacts, and Change in English: Methodological and Historical Dimensions of Corpus Linguistics, 6. ISSN 1797-4453

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Abstract

Society is increasingly dependent on digital information. Much of this is available online free of charge but metadata is at a premium. This has encouraged the emergence of a new online phenomenon known as social (or collaborative) tagging. The predominant social tagging site is Delicious, which allows users to assign keywords (or ‘tags’) to their bookmarks (favourite web pages) to describe their content. These tags are then shared with other users, who can search the collection by tag. However, many of the linguistic problems which exist in traditional keyword search remain. Most research on tagging to date has been conducted by information scientists, but this paper describes new work which is examining social tagging from a corpus linguistic perspective. Our discussion compares the new, text-external aboutness indicators offered by social tagging with text-internal aboutness indicators. We illustrate how we are using this multi-layered approach to aboutness both to make better sense of the existing social tagging and to suggest guidelines for better tagging practice. Our work aims to reconcile the worlds of formal textual analysis and intuition.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Submitted to REF 2014, UoA 29, Andrew Kehoe
Dates:	Date Event 2011 UNSPECIFIED
Subjects:	CAH19 - language and area studies > CAH19-01 - English studies > CAH19-01-07 - linguistics CAH19 - language and area studies > CAH19-01 - English studies > CAH19-01-01 - English studies (non-specific)
Divisions:	Faculty of Arts, Design and Media > College of English and Media
Depositing User:	Andrew Kehoe
Date Deposited:	20 Feb 2017 13:52
Last Modified:	11 Jun 2024 12:08
URI:	https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/466

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