Premium
Characteristics of tagging behavior in digitized humanities online collections
Author(s) -
Choi Youngok,
Syn Sue Yeon
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.903
H-Index - 145
eISSN - 2330-1643
pISSN - 2330-1635
DOI - 10.1002/asi.23472
Subject(s) - terminology , resource (disambiguation) , context (archaeology) , computer science , world wide web , search engine indexing , information retrieval , digital library , scholarship , geography , linguistics , computer network , philosophy , poetry , archaeology , political science , law
The purpose of this study was to examine user tags that describe digitized archival collections in the field of humanities. A collection of 8,310 tags from a digital portal (Nineteenth‐Century Electronic Scholarship, NINES ) was analyzed to find out what attributes of primary historical resources users described with tags. Tags were categorized to identify which tags describe the content of the resource, the resource itself, and subjective aspects (e.g., usage or emotion). The study's findings revealed that over half were content‐related; tags representing opinion, usage context, or self‐reference, however, reflected only a small percentage. The study further found that terms related to genre or physical format of a resource were frequently used in describing primary archival resources. It was also learned that nontextual resources had lower numbers of content‐related tags and higher numbers of document‐related tags than textual resources and bibliographic materials; moreover, textual resources tended to have more user‐context‐related tags than other resources. These findings help explain users' tagging behavior and resource interpretation in primary resources in the humanities. Such information provided through tags helps information professionals decide to what extent indexing archival and cultural resources should be done for resource description and discovery, and understand users' terminology.