A micro-study of tagging

One of the social gimmicks at the IA Summit in March was oversized name tags so people could tag themselves (and each other). I starting taking pictures of people's name tags with the vague notion that there might be something interesting about them.

I collected about 30 pictures of name tags in total. After reviewing and organizing them, I realized I had a kind of micro-study of people's ideas about tags. What's here, then, is a loose categorization of the ways people tagged themselves along with some sketchy inferences.

(This is something like my previous dive into armchair ethnography... except these are more like cultural probes. But whatever.)

Tag Clouds

Tag clouds were the most common structural form of tags. Tag-clouders were mostly men. People who had written about tagging (Dan, Christian, Don) used variations in size and boldness to emphasize tags (as seen in Flickr, Technorati, etc.). Others were more chaotic.

In grouping these I had to ask myself "what makes a tag cloud?" I ended up deciding on two criteria: a cloud-like formation with no particular order (thus tags with delimiters were considered lists) and emphasized tags (biggened, boldened, etc.).

Interestingly, only one person--Peter Merholz--encouraged folksonomic tagging (tagging of himself by others).

Lists

A less common structural form was lists, sometimes with signifiers like bullets, commas or pipes. List-makers were mostly women, though I think a sample of five is really too small to say anything concrete.

One thing that struck me, though, is that it's a lot easier to write out a list than to make a tag cloud. The tag cloud takes planning, arranging, emphasizing... all of which has to be undertaken with some understanding of the final form.

The lists, in contrast, had an unaffected quickness to them. (Overall, I thought list-maker Stacy Surla had the best name tag. Wabi sabi, indeed.)

Attention Seekers

Whether through exuberance, necessity or discomfort with the notion of tagging name tags, some people used their tags to draw attention.

I make no judgements; I'm just an observer.

Those That Resemble Personal Ads

While talking to Samantha Bailey I mentioned that her name tag looked like a dating profile (to which she recoiled with drawn out "ewwwwwww"). But anyway, there were a few that resembled, at least superficially, personal ads.

Drawings

Drawings were uncommon (and not just in my sample). The over-sized name tag was perfect for sketches, but only a few people did them. One guy I met--no picture, unfortunately--had a topic map diagram on his tag. There's a kind of geeky irony there.

Self-representation

The other thing that's interesting is that these name tags are also personal statements, projections of the wearer's identity. So Don Turnbull's tagcloud shows that he's a tagging expert. Peter Morville likes crosswords. Some low-level functionary from Microsoft was uncomfortable revealing his name, which tells us something important about him and his employer.

There are other qualities we can infer from the name tags. Some people have a few big ideas, while others have many smaller ideas (or maybe they have many big ideas and not enough space for them). Some people are neat, others messy (and don't mind you knowing about their lactose intolerance).

Some Takeaways

Aside from the tag-clouders, visual representation of people's tags was pretty diverse. And though tag clouds were the most common form (in my sample) they were in the minority overall.

My one tentative conclusion from all of this is that there's no dominant mental model of tag presentation (even in a knowledgable community of practice like information architects). But, of course, there are so many variables--the tagging "interface," the purpose of the tags, etc.--that that conclusion can't be drawn strongly. Still, it seems to support the other anecdotal evidence I've heard that most people don't understand tag clouds.

Finally, for a more-or-less accidental research project I found this little name tag study suprisingly deep. Every few weeks I'd look at the photos again and notice some new and interesting detail (which is why it took four months to write this post). So I think I might try cultural probes on a real project.