Hypertext day 3 – Tagging and Hyperstructure

So iMapping, thats pretty great. Check it out. Personal knowledge management is not the most focussed knowledge management. Most people dont have that much knowledge to manange. However for researchers where we always have large corpuses of material and often have to switch context there is deffinately scope. I would be a good system to try for managing your PhD.    Heiko Haller the systems developer is clearly very tallented man and has put an incredible ammount of time into making the software polished and functional. It allows to create mind maps, concept maps and just express relations between data in a spacial hypertext. you can collapse and expand compex concepts and hide/show links between things to hide complexity. The system has a zoomable intface which allows you to focus on area of the concept map very quickly and easy any. Just zoom in an more detail is exposed. I hope at some point ill have time to create a spacial hypertext of map of hypertext 2010 as a means of demonstrating the system. In the mean timesee also: imapping.info

This afternoons talks about tagging are very close to my concerns. A lot of people have used ways to model tagging behaviour but in this section people seems to be looking at what the semantics of making a tag are. What does making a tag really mean? It seems from Christian Körner’s presentation that there are two types of tagger, catagorizers and describers. One is movitvated by personal rediscovery and tend to have small vocabularies (low number of different tags often reused). Others are discribers who are using tags to describe the resource for other users. So for these kind of users presuably their tag means (semantically) something different. This information would be incredibly useful for humbox and Edshare and all their various brothers and sisters. We really arent making enough use of our tags and Hypertext has showed me that there is some real value there to be exploited. But what about reading.ecs where tags are derived by the system? Enter Marek Lipczak:

Marek has been looking at exactly that. How similar are tags to keywords we can derive from the title. I have to look into it more closely but it looks very promising. My opinions of the research we radically escalated when I made a monumental appearence in the presentation. A screen shot of delicious page for the hypertext website was show and Dave Flanders (JISC) was one of the taggers. Furthermore one of tags he used was my name! So im famous by proxy.

Another interesting idea discussed was pivot browsing. The idea that when you return your search results you also return a list of tags or tag cloud which are tags related to the results you return. I like the sound of the idea. A blended approach between searching and browsing. It may help to reduce the problem of retrieving a small number of search results. Even a list of 3 results can make useful list of related tags. There was also some an interesting discussion about the style of tagging on twitter. Hashtags which have become synomous of twitter but their semantics are very different to that of say a delicious tags. Tags are not often designed for rediscoverablilty because twitter’s archive is not that long lived. Often tags will be discussion areas or just for the lols. One resounding by product of twitter tags is what Jeff Huang described as mirco-memes. Tag which is incredibly popular for 1-5 days but then disappears almost completely. One of the examples included #willgetyouslapped. It’s and interesting idea, that something can go into fashion and out again in one beat of the webs heart.

Finally for the day was the Frontiers strand. This struck me as being “big science”. I was incredibly impressed by the research. The talk I was really taken by was by James Goulding and his talk on Dimensional Hypertext and hyperstructures. He made some very interesting points. So interesting that it is my aim to read his thesis (the first i have ever read out of interest). Sadly it has proved very hard to get hold of but theres some really good information science in there im certain. Also his presentation was absolute dynamite so kudos!