Social Software for Research (Reprise)
December 26th, 2005Steven Bell asked me to clarify how I use tagging systems for research purposes:
“I find that the tags are usually far too broad to help much with “keeping up” on a particular topic. For example, there are tags for “college” or “university” which yield far too broad results. What I really want is “higher education” but since tags can only be a single term (at least in the sites I’ve tried – unless you want to hyphenate – which no one has done) it’s difficult to get specific enough. Same thing with “academic libraries”. The tag “library” yields information on every kind of library, including data libraries. If you’ve found a better way to get specificity with these tools for research (other than having a highly unique single term) share your tips.”
Looking back, I wonder why I didn’t elaborate before (I must have had other stuff on my mind). So, here is how I do it. It’s not a completely thought out, but I have found that it works on a majority of the information I research.
As I mentioned, the concept of social capital is an interest of mine. In del.icio.us, I subscribe to three feeds that could possibly lead to new resources on the topic, based on my experiences with user-tagging personalities: socialcapital, social-capital, and social_capital. You’ll notice that most of the resources are different due to the different ways in which people tag content as Social Capital. Sure, there will be some hit or miss, but there’s always hit or miss when it comes to retrospective research (well, this has been my experience at least).
To take Steven’s example, take a look at highereducation, higher-education (heh – the first tag I see on this entry is Steven Bell’s blog, which he seemed to have tagged himself), and higher_education. The resulting resources aren’t bad, but they could be better. Social Capital is a narrower phrase than Higher Education
Thus, maybe this works for certain phrases and not others. I have had much success with many of the tag feeds that I read. This would make for an interesting scholarly study. Does anyone have any more suggestions for using social software (tagging resources in particular) in research? Maybe finding those who tag a lot on topics that interest you? That seems to work for me as well.
