Curated Folksonomies: Three Implementations of Structure through Human Judgment

Curated folksonomies present a possibility for implementing the human judgment of expert controlled vocabulary design at scale by giving users the opportunity to review and revise the folksonomy, interpreting tags as synonymous or related. The same processes that produce large, user-generated collections and their messy folksonomies can also produce controlled vocabularies, given particular system design choices.

The existence of this alternative model indicates a space in knowledge organization for heteromation—a technological approach in which users rather than computers make the critical decisions (Ekbia and Nardi 2014). This model extends and concretizes recurrent ideas in the knowledge organization literature such as democratic indexing (Hidderley and Rafferty 1997), tag gardening (Peters and Weller 2008), and structured folksonomies (Yoo et al. 2013), with a particular emphasis on human decision making in the final form of the knowledge organization system. Exploring the curated folksonomy approach opens up new ways of understanding the concerns and goals of the field of knowledge organization, including notions of power, accountability, and the possibility to represent a plurality of voices

I examine these curated folksonomies through the lens of traditional knowledge organization criteria of precision, recall, equivalency, hierarchy, and fidelity. My analysis reveals key design choices within the curated folksonomy space that allow for greater complexity of structure or simple solutions to synonymy.

(emphasis my own)

An exemplar of this approach is Adler’s (2014) study of users’ tags for transgender-themed books in which Adler noted the importance of open-ended labelling as an empowering discursive practice for individuals and communities historically marginalized and harmed by labelling conventions. Ideally, as user-driven knowledge organization systems, folksonomies provide an opportunity for a community to negotiate terms, express dissent from the dominant terminology, and otherwise resist and work around more static terminology imposed from the top down

Tag combination is driven by a single basic rule: Tags should be combined only when they are the same in both meaning and usage on LibraryThing

First, as an intersection of bottom-up and top-down design methods, curated folksonomies suggest new ways to understand the convergence and divergence between the philosophies of these two extremes (Mai 2011; Feinberg 2006; Furner 2009). Second, as an alternative to computational approaches, curated folksonomies embody a validation of human judgment and domain expertise, suggesting a possible alignment with knowledge organization approaches that value the human as an instrument of analysis, interpretation, and accountability (Hjørland and Albrechtsen 1995; Feinberg 2011).