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| tag.class | ||
|---|---|---|
| Author(s): | Mohit SantRam Sean Salmon |
 |
| Instructor: | Shirky, Clay | |
| Class: | Thinking About Networks | |
| URL: | http://santram.net/tagclass | |
| Documents: | tag.class.jpg(JPEG) | |
| Keywords: | tag, tagging, folksonomy, thinking about networks, programming, sql, php | |
| A student-generated folksonomy of our classes and ITP professors. | ||
| By using tags, students are able to attach information to specific classes and professors in a non-narrative fashion. Students are able to quickly peruse a catalog of all classes and professors and attach meaning to as many as they like, thereby sharing their experience with the collective asynchronously. Our goal is an attempt to create a forum that preserves hallway conversations, email threads, and experiences to fellow students in a virtual arena. | ||
| Background: | We spent some time discussing social software and the problems that exist in the space. Rather than creating yet another social software application, we decided to investigate how tags are changing the definition of information, people, places, and objects here at ITP. | |
| Audience: | Our audience is the immediate collection of students and alumni. Through tagging, we hope to leverage the shared experiences of ITP students, past and present, to attach useful information about classes and professors as they see fit. The tags used would then be analyzed to study the processes and habits of groups tagging. | |
| User Scenario: | The website displays a complete listing of every class and professor at ITP during the current academic year. Students are able to create and view tags on a dedicated machine placed in the ITP lounge. Other networks of people will be able to tag the same information remotely by visiting the project website. The tags for a particular class and professor can be viewed giving the viewer better insight into their peer's experience. | |
| Technical System Description: | tag.class has been released to the ITP community via the list, by changing the homepage on each browser on the lab machines to out site, and by daily reminders to friends. During the ITP Winter Show 2005, a dedicated machine on the floor will be on display showing the results and the ability for others to add their own tags. The project is built simply using php+mySQL. Our hope is to display the relevant information, the tags, quickly and easily to the ITP community. | |
| Project References, Research and Literature: | The most obvious sources of inspiration were centered around flickr, itp.licio.us, and del.icio.us. We looked at the patterns of tagging and more importantly how people use tags to describe the items in their photographs. | |
| Conclusions: | The hope is that we will be able to see group effects and specifically the evolution of tags over a week. With several networks of people tagging the 5-7 sets of photographs, we hope that the intersections of tags will provide greater insight into how social networks function and how tags are learned, used, and applied. | |