New: Tag pages and related tags
UPDATE: I also added a section for the "most recent books tagged xyz." RSS feed to come.
At 10:42 Sunday evening, LibraryThing acquired its one millionth tag. (hapgood applied the tag writing to the book On Writer's Block.) In celebration, I have added a new feature: tag info pages.
Tag info pages resemble the tag pages on Deli.cio.us (a new service people are calling "LibraryThing for websites"). A tag info page lays out who uses the tag, the books mostly frequently tagged with it and the tags "related" to the tag. I find tag info pages both vaguely pointless and wierdly fun.
Some examples: divination, short stories, glbt, humor (also humour, which is different*), chick lit, cthulhu, evolution, alexander the great, jesus, depression and slavery. Also check out some of the biggies, like fiction, science fiction, fantasy, history, religion and biography. Some of the personal tags are interesting too. Is it surprising that the Silmarillion is the top book in unread? What does it say that half the books in twaddle are about the French philosopher Derrida? (Okay okay, I'm the only one using that tag right now, I admit it.)**
As you can tell, it has a slightly different look than other LT pages. You'll see this design spreading through LT gradually—less clutter, more info.
*Clay Shirky's essay / talk "Ontology is Overated" has a section on why it doesn't make sense to alias user metadata, taking LiveJournal's movie and cinema groups as an example:
Incidentally, the cinema vs. movie thing holds up at LibraryThing. Cinema includes academic/critical works like There must be a Lone Ranger: The American West in film and in reality. Movies starts with The Princess Bride, presumably because it was made into a movie.
**Also see crap, junk, trash and even bullshit. Others are now jumping on the twaddle bandwagon. I need something new—piffle, balderdash, malarky?
At 10:42 Sunday evening, LibraryThing acquired its one millionth tag. (hapgood applied the tag writing to the book On Writer's Block.) In celebration, I have added a new feature: tag info pages.
Tag info pages resemble the tag pages on Deli.cio.us (a new service people are calling "LibraryThing for websites"). A tag info page lays out who uses the tag, the books mostly frequently tagged with it and the tags "related" to the tag. I find tag info pages both vaguely pointless and wierdly fun.
Some examples: divination, short stories, glbt, humor (also humour, which is different*), chick lit, cthulhu, evolution, alexander the great, jesus, depression and slavery. Also check out some of the biggies, like fiction, science fiction, fantasy, history, religion and biography. Some of the personal tags are interesting too. Is it surprising that the Silmarillion is the top book in unread? What does it say that half the books in twaddle are about the French philosopher Derrida? (Okay okay, I'm the only one using that tag right now, I admit it.)**
As you can tell, it has a slightly different look than other LT pages. You'll see this design spreading through LT gradually—less clutter, more info.
*Clay Shirky's essay / talk "Ontology is Overated" has a section on why it doesn't make sense to alias user metadata, taking LiveJournal's movie and cinema groups as an example:
"The cataloguers first reaction to that is, 'Oh my god, that means you won't be introducing the movies people to the cinema people!' To which the obvious answer is 'Good! The movie people don't want to hang out with the cinema people.'"Humor vs. humor is another great example. America (the Book): A citizen's guide to democracy inaction is "humor." But How to be a Canadian, even if you already are one is definitely "humour."
Incidentally, the cinema vs. movie thing holds up at LibraryThing. Cinema includes academic/critical works like There must be a Lone Ranger: The American West in film and in reality. Movies starts with The Princess Bride, presumably because it was made into a movie.
**Also see crap, junk, trash and even bullshit. Others are now jumping on the twaddle bandwagon. I need something new—piffle, balderdash, malarky?
posted by Tim at 8:04 PM
30 Comments:
As a Canadian, I use both tags - humour and humor - for all hum*rous books, regardless of national origin.
Yes, I could label all American funny stuff as humor, and all British/Commonwealth funny stuff as humour. But what do I do about Osamu Tezuka's brilliantly funny manga about the life of Buddha? And what do I do about hum*r from my own country, where we can't even decide which spelling we prefer?
Hmm, now you've got me thinking I should do exactly that: split up all my funny stuff into humor (Yank), humour (British), and hum*r (Canuck, European, Asian, etc.).
Tags is hard sometimes :-(
You're not the first to voice "tag angst." My message is: Don't worry!
The point isn't that Americans should tag funny books "humor" and Canadians "humour," or that we must search our souls to see if we are "cinema" people or "movie" people. The point is that these patterns emerge naturally from the way we think about the world.
Although the differences between "humor" and "humor" do mean something, keep in mind that the tags will find each other. The "related" algorithm doesn't connect things based upon what other tags people who tag a book "humor" also apply to the book. It's based on what other tags are applied to books tagged "humor." The difference is subtle but important. It means that if Americans tag The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "humor" and Canadians tag it "humour" the system will infer that the tags are related, and indeed it does.
So, relax and enjoy the mess. Pretty soon you'll see the order.
Re: "cinema vs. movie"
But -- what about film??
~smile~
I have an 'argh' tag. I don't think it requires much explanation. :)
I use 'humour' exclusively, though - it practically hurts to leave the u out, even for US-sourced texts. There are quite a few titles where it would be appropriate, though (the Baby Blues series, for instance, which has no European editions). Perhaps I'll think about it.
I haven't yet arrived at the shelves where the true "twaddle" in my collection lives, but I have cataloged some of the books that "blewmymind". ;)
I reazlied last night that apparently, in my heart of hearts, I don't really believe political science exists. I have lots of books tagged "economics", a few tagged "sociology", and maybe two tagged "archeology". But instead of "politicalscience" I just have "politics".
Economics... All Your Social Sciences Are Belong To Us!
As an American, I've known some fellow Americans to spell the word "humour". Almost without exception, those people have held delusions of grandeur (or at least delusions of being Brits). Not that there's anything wrong with spelling it that way - I quite like the "ou" spelling. However; I think this means that I agree with your "film versus movie" example. :)
Cery cool!
Could we have a comment feature at the bottom of each tag page so people could talk about why they use the tag? Or link into the upcoming mesageboard? May be especially useful for words that have several meanings.
May be especially useful for words that have several meanings.
Yes, indeed! Case in point: I use the tag "book and paper conservation". The tag info page shows me the related tag "conservation". But most of the top books with that tag have to do with environmental issues.
By the way, I am finding the tag info pages extremely distracting, causing me to wander off into some very curious and interesting by-ways, not to mention a resulting increase in the number of books on my wish list!
It is well-known that there are three kinds of drivers - those that drive too fast, those that drive too slowly and me. Similarly there seem to be two kinds of taggers - those that get it wrong and me.
Tags bring out the LOON (League of Obsessive Nitpickers) in me - I'm a cataloguer by profession, and I don't normally work with uncontrolled vocabulary. When I first started using Library Thing I looked at the tag cloud and the various tags meaning the same thing (e.g. cookbook/cookbooks/cookery/cooking) and got a bit twitchy :). I seem to have got over it, though, judging by my own tags which are certainly not LC-approved.
I resolutely use Canadian/British spelling, though - I may have to use US spelling for cataloguing at work but I'm happy to be able to indulge my preference here.
Speaking of tags, what happened to that thing where you could rename tags? Is that replaced by the power edit add/remove tags? If so, might be nice to have a power edit replace.
Also, I would find it more convenient if there were line breaks after each tag in one's list of tags. So,
tbr (74)
twaddle (13)
rather than tbr (74), twaddle (13)
Very minor, I know, but you're so responsive and so good....
I double-tagged any of my books that I felt the social data might matter to me. I used the "change tags" option. When I'd finished entering all my books I went to my tag "adapted" and changed it to "adapted" and "made into movie" which I noticed other people were using. Same with SF / science fiction, humor / humour and a few others.
Oh, and I use movie / film / cinema to mean different things - movies are the works, film, is the medium, and cinema is the industry / apparatus. Just sayin'.
As I said, I'm a big fan of the real differences between alleged synonymns—movie, cinema, film. But when a single tag is used for two totally different things, that's a problem.
I wonder what thinking there is on this issue. It would probably be possible to look at a large body of tags and detect this and present the tags as "group A" and "group B." This is a bit esoteric for me to think about while LT still has real bugs and real opportunities, but I wonder if someone's done work on it.
BTW: I'm behind on blog and email responses. I have a freelance job I couldn't pass on without kissing the company goodbye, and while LibraryThing is a wonderful gig, I may need them some day.
> The point isn't that {snip} we
> must search our souls to see if
> we are "cinema" people or
> "movie" people. The point is
> that these patterns emerge
> naturally from the way we think
> about the world.
I understand. Thanks to the tag question, I've given more thought lately to the dividing line between (say) satire and parody than I ever did in the past.
This also reminds me of one of the great transatlantic divides - Sherlock Holmes fandom. North American fans of the Master refer to their study as Sherlockiana while their British cousins call it Holmesiana. (I seem to be the only person using *that* tag at the moment...)
Tim, what do you have in mind about the same tag being used for two totally different things?
I kind of think, well, this isn't the library of congress and we aren't trying to put it out of business in the standardised subject classifications department. The slight differences from user to user are part of the pleasure, as you've been pointing out.
I find the tag variability thing more problematic using del.icio.us - my tag is "austen" but other people are using "janeausten" "jane.austen" and "jane-austen" and "austenjane", so it's a real pain for me to find out what other users are bookmarking.
Tim - It seems to me that you could somehow apply whatever technique you're using to find similar libraries: start with all the books tagged with a given tag; divide into two groups, treating the books in the two groups as two libraries; find the division of books into groups that makes them least "similar". Then examine the remaining tags associated with the two groups for differences.
Linkmeister - Back in Marx's day it was called "political economy", and the mathematical tools with which economics has waged its war of assimilation hadn't really been developed yet. But surely some contemporary wag has written an essay on the subject, since it's a bit of a running joke among economists.
Hmm.. and speaking of LOC classifications, it would be cool if we could do something useful with that data, e.g. sort books by primary classification, or browse the categories and drill down into them. There are lots of times when tags work better, but one thing I do miss about spending time in libraries is the serendipity of finding an interesting book near, but not exactly classified the same as, the book I was "looking for".
Silly me. Apparently you can sort by LOC call number in some of the views. It's just that very few of my entries have LOC data, since most of them apparently came from Amazon...
If the ISBN exists in both Amazon and LOC, could the call number be imported into the record automagically? I like to use Amazon when possible because it knows whether the book is hardcover or paperback...
I'm an ex-cataloguer (and classifier) and had a lot of trouble getting my head round tags; like Tardis I hankered after a controlled-term thesaurus or a structured approach. But I got over it. I really can't see the utility of using 'humor' and 'humour' to indicate the origin of a text; I actually use 'english literature' to mean lit. in English, so no 'american literature', but I allow 'south american literature', having embraced the joys of inconsistency. I seem to be the only person using the tag 'flatulence': lone tags have their own fascination
>Speaking of tags, what happened >to that thing where you could >rename tags? Is that replaced by >the power edit add/remove tags? >If so, might be nice to have a >power edit replace.
I second this! I have both "children's" and "childrens", the second through error. Unfortunately, I tagged about 300 of them incorrectly!
Like Lucy Tartan, I also couldn't find the "change tags" function now that I need it. I decided to tag my Japanese books with "上" and "下" since that how they're marked when, as is most often the case, they are published in two volumes.
As for synonymous tags, since the beginning I've used all variations of language names, for example both "farsi" and "persian".
I think "synonymous" author names (and maybe book names) are a real problem needing addressing compared to synonymous tags. I think I've now found three groups of "Gabriel García Márquez" of varying sizes.
Tuesday 11/08/05 9:23 am PT
Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Too many connections in /home/virtual/site8/fst/var/www/html/profile.php on line 125
- fatal error (1)
Arrgggggghh!
(soothes) It's working now...
cannot log in:
Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Too many connections in /home/virtual/site8/fst/var/www/html/signup.php on line 12
- fatal error (1)
Getting the same fatal error...
{clutches chest}
{dies}
Cripes! I thought 'Arrggghh' was over-doing it a little!
<{clutches chest}
{dies}>
A defibrillator with every membership.
Well, "Balderdash", "Hogwash", "malarkey", or even the simple, good-old fashioned "Bullshit" are not as patently dismissive as twaddle, is. Defining something as twaddle barely dignifes it with the fact that you have given it notice.
Is it just me, or are both linked intances of "humor" spelt without a u, one with a capital H and the other without?
I was referring to "Humor vs. humor," of course.
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