Characteristics of tagging behavior in digitized humanities online collections

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine user tags that describe digitized archival collections in the field of humanities. A collection of 8,310 tags from a digital portal (Nineteenth‐Century Electronic Scholarship, NINES) was analyzed to find out what attributes of primary historical resources users described with tags. Tags were categorized to identify which tags describe the content of the resource, the resource itself, and subjective aspects (e.g., usage or emotion). The study's findings revealed that over half were content‐related; tags representing opinion, usage context, or self‐reference, however, reflected only a small percentage. The study further found that terms related to genre or physical format of a resource were frequently used in describing primary archival resources. It was also learned that nontextual resources had lower numbers of content‐related tags and higher numbers of document‐related tags than textual resources and bibliographic materials; moreover, textual resources tended to have more user‐context‐related tags than other resources. These findings help explain users' tagging behavior and resource interpretation in primary resources in the humanities. Such information provided through tags helps information professionals decide to what extent indexing archival and cultural resources should be done for resource description and discovery, and understand users' terminology.

Subject indexing in humanities: a comparison between a local university repository and an international bibliographic service

“…For example, in the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of digital humanities, it has become increasingly important to provide quality subject access to the vast variety of heterogeneous information objects catalogued by digital services. This includes both primary (see, e.g., Choi and Syn, 2016, on the use of tags in archival collections) and secondary sources, the latter being the focus of the present study. Although secondary sources in the humanities include monographs and book chapters much more than in the sciences, we will focus on journal articles because they tend to be more completely represented and reviewed in the bibliographic sense.…”

“…This includes both primary (see, e.g. Choi and Syn, 2016, on the use of tags in archival collections) and secondary sources, the latter being the focus of the present study. Although secondary sources in the humanities include monographs and book chapters much more than in the sciences, we will focus on journal articles because they tend to be more completely represented and reviewed in the bibliographic sense.…”

Investigating Users’ Tagging Behavior in Online Academic Community Based on Growth Model: Difference between Active and Inactive Users

“…Concerned with the second aspect, Mezghani et al (2017) used tags to detect users' interests. Choi and Syn (2016) investigated the characteristics of users' tagging behavior in the field of humanities. Golbeck et al (2011) examined the relationship between tagging behavior and features of the media.…”

An investigation of cross-cultural social tagging behaviours between Chinese and Americans

“…Similarly, Pak et al (2007) argued that tagging is a much lighter cognitive task than indexing with controlled vocabularies. Other studies have tried to understand the factors influencing social tagging use, which mainly consist of system-suggested tags (Golder and Huberman, 2006), existing tags added by other users (Fu et al , 2010), resource types (Choi and Syn, 2016), user’s historical tags (Sen et al , 2006) and so forth. Related studies have also investigated the statistical characteristics of social tags.…”