Paper Reading #16: Tag expression: tagging with feeling

Comments:

TBD

Reference Information:

Title: Tag expression: tagging with feeling

Authors: Jesse Vig, Matthew Soukup, Shilad Sen, and John Riedl of University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Presentation Venue: UIST '10 Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology

Summary:

The paper presented by the researcher's is concerned with the introduction of Tag Expressions. This addition to the metadata present in current tag technology allows the user to apply reasons explaining the tag with a more emotional basis rather than the strict data / information-based entry currently employed. The reasons that are applied will describe why the user liked, disliked, or was neutral in feeling to the item being tagged.

The team responsible for the research created a visualization interface to display the data to the user. It allowed them to apply reasons to multiple tags in a set. Once the tags were affected by the user, they were color coded in the interface such that it would display the like / dislike / neutral basis applied by the user.

Discussion:

I think this sort of an interface would be great to apply to other social spaces such as Facebook. It would be nice if Facebook would give us an option besides just "like." This would allow there to be more expressiveness available in the social space and we would be able to engage other senses to increase our understanding of posts and people's opinions on posts.

I think that adding depth to metadata in many different situation allows us to better control and understand the media. MP3s with well tagged metadata tend to be more useful to me than one's that are sparse in their metadata. It allows for greater connectivity and ease of access to related information. The whole virtual space of human data could do with improving of the metadata and this scheme provided by the researchers of this paper seems to be one way in which to do it.