We asked six Communication Design students to be participants in a tag project called the Creative Image and Idea Index.
For the next six weeks, every time they checked out a book in the course of their regular study, research, or reading, a form was attached with 2 simple questions:
- What types of images or ideas were you looking for? (Examples: Nike logo, Corporate brands)
- What keywords (aka "tags") should we use to describe the images and ideas you found in this book? (Examples: Nike, marketing, trademarks, logos)
After six weeks of tagging, the 6 Communication Design students tagged 19 books and used 95 tags. A list of popular tags appears on the right. The most frequently used tags were "graphic design", "black and white" and "logos". The tags from our study conformed to the power law described earlier; meaning most of the tags were used only once. No book was tagged by more than 1 person.
Problems
Time and size of study: Six weeks and six people were not enough to garner the kind of data we had hoped for. During observations in the library, we witnessed the same books being used repeatedly, but our study was not expansive or long enough to reflect this usage.
Given the number of tags we collected, we concluded that there was no way to implement the tags as meaningful descriptors without editing them and turning them into taxonomies. To avoid this problem in the future, we would need to recreate the study with more students participating for a longer amount of time. This problem, though, led us to wonder if there was a way to evaluate tags without destroying a folksonomy.
