findability.org

Well I'm not sure I totally agree with it either. That's why the presentation has a fourth item at the end, about resilience theory, which asks "but what if we're wrong?" Also the talk argues that a major value of tagging is how it can help us reconceptualize IA; It's not just another item in the toolkit ((the talk argues this better than the paper).

Your comments are good, though I have responses to both (of course!)

We are not arguing that IAs have ignored tags (though it would be easy to get this impression from the paper). Rather, we are pointing out two basic responses to tagging: tagging is progress and tagging is regress, each of which has both moderate and extreme variations.

IAs were initially on the regress side, for the most part. But the success of delicious and flickr has made it impossible to wholly dismiss collaborative tagging. So it's not surprising that many IAs have embraced tagging, albeit with some pragamatic skepticism. I think it's important to appreciate this skepticism, for it balances the open enthusiasm held by those who have long held more optimistic and occassionally utopian opinions of tagging and folksonomies and so forth.

Enter pace layering, which has been used (notably by you, in Ambient Findability) to incorporate tagging into the conceptual framework for IA. But the way this has been done implicitly argues that the work IAs do, the kinds of rich structures we create, is still deeper, richer, more important, and of lasting value. Tags are great, this says, but they're just not as good as CVs in the long run, and never will be.

We are not arguing that IAs have ignored tags, but that they have recognized the value of tagging in a safe, comfortable, and somewhat patronizing way--a way that doesn't upset their worldview. This view may be *entirely* correct. Or not. Either way, tagging deserves a closer look. Right now we have lots of opinions and some anecdotal evidence, but not much deep understanding. So we may be overlooking important things in much the same way that when information retrieval was first applied to the Web it overlooked the assumption that user-supplied metadata would be trustworthy, or that hyperlinks had little value for relevance ranking.

The paper goes on to explore complexity and resilience theory, from which we argue that tagging has complex implications which a simple pace layering model does not reveal.

As to ignoring context, we most definitely do ignore it. But is this a "sin?" While recognizing and understanding context is often important there are many cases where it is not.

Ignoring context is vital to developing a scientific understanding of many phenomena. Take baseball. If we want to understand the physics of baseball--how long the ball will stay in the air, where it will land, and so forth--we *must* ignore context. We should not worry about the rules of the game, the price of hotdogs, or the third baseman's salary. These are immaterial to throwing a baseball. Moreover, only by ignoring context will we be able to extend our newfound understanding to other realms, like throwing a football or a cabbage.

In a sense, the baseball problem does involve context. For example, we need to understand gravity, which is different on earth than it is on the moon. We might also need to understand wind, if there is a lot of it. And if the ball is particularly large and we are able to throw it at a high speed, we may need to know about drag and coefficients of friction. These factors constitute what we might call the physical context.

This is not what most people mean when they ask about "context". They usually mean "what about the social, political, and cultural contexts?" They use the term as shorthand. It's critical to know the relevant context(s) for a particular problem. If we are studying baseball as a physical process, we must address the physical context. If studying baseball as a cultural phenomenon, we must obviously address the cultural and social contexts. Get the context wrong and you won't get very far.

Our paper treats tagging like baseball, more or less. We look to complexity theory and resilience theory as tools for understanding tagging, independent of social and cultural contexts, be it the free-wheeling blogosphere or the realm of corporate and government Web sites. Obviously this can only take us so far, for tagging is intensely social, which is probably what distinguishes it from classical free-form indexing. But there are times when you need to deliberately ignore some complexity to understand the fundamental elements.

So yes, we ignore context, but out of necessity because of the questions we are asking.