Ian's Digital Weblog

Finally! A non-project related entry- I ran across this paper on the philosophy of folksonomies written by Elaine Peterson, a professor at Montana State University. It's a quick read for anyone interested in the linguistic implications of social tagging. Peterson writes: "It is irrelevant that digital items can reside in more than one place, since one is talking about a classification scheme, not about the items themselves."

Peterson goes on to characterize folksonomies as employing a form of philosophical relativism(For example, rather than stating that A is or isn't B, one is saying A is relative to B). Because social tagging allows for a large degree of inconsistency, Peterson posits that it becomes difficult to clarify what is and isn't true about a thing when it is organized entirely by relative interpretation.

Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy

Today, blogger and technologist David Weinberger posted a response:
"Tags are not always truth claims, and a folksonomy is not intended to mirror nature...Folksonomies reinforce our move away from the essentialist view that every thing has a single category that reflects its single and real essence. We’ve been moving away from that view for a long time as a culture."

Weinberger is always an interesting read. His main point seems to be that comparing traditional and folksonomic classifications is perhaps inappropriate, as each has its own set of strengths and weaknesses and are designed for very different purposes:

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