Open AccessSocial tagging in China and the USA: A comparative study
Author(s) -
Xu Chen,
Chu Heting
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
proceedings of the american society for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1550-8390
pISSN - 0044-7870
DOI - 10.1002/meet.2008.1450450257
Subject(s) - search engine indexing , computer science , set (abstract data type) , noun , information retrieval , china , proper noun , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , history , archaeology , programming language
Two sites for tagging, one in China (i.e., 365Key) and one in the USA (i.e., Del.icio.us) are compared in terms of tagging mechanisms and tags created. In general, the Chinese tagging site provides its users with more pre‐set functions whereas its American counterpart gives more freedom to its taggers. Our findings also show that tagging, like many other information behaviors, is greatly influenced by and stamped with the social and cultural traditions existing in each country. Taggers in both countries, however, do tend to choose terms of same or similar meanings, indicating that tagging, regardless of where it is done and where the tagger is from, is usually done according to the fundamental rules in indexing (e.g., nouns or noun phrases as tags). On the other hand, tagging as an activity unique in the networked environment for loosely representing and organizing all kinds of information, does not seem equal to keyword indexing which has been done in producing database systems (e.g., InfoTrac) and search engines (e.g., Google).