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Tagging and revelations
Jul. 26th, 2010 05:52 pmSo, I've been meditating on the uses of tags-as-labels versus tags-as-indexing, in a fic archive. Have some thinking-out-loud sort of results.
Short form: The two uses are really not the same at all.
I, for example, have tended to use tags as labels. In this usage, they need to be clear, minimal and not redundant, which leads to, for example, not tagging with a character name when that name is already included in a pairing.
On the other hand, tagging to index calls for every last bit of information imaginable, and welcomes redundancy. After all, the tags are now supposed to make the story findable along multiple axes of search.
Using searchable tags for indexing makes all kinds of sense, and I am, in fact, banging on some code to add a whole bunch of searchables to my personal archive. But part of the banging involves actually hiding the tags in question most of the time, because index-tags should not all be shown in the story blurb/summary/whathaveyou. That's the place for labels, instead. Index-tags in a label-tag context are massive information overload, and the redundancy that makes them useful for indexing just makes them hard to wade through as labels.
This is one of the things that's bugged me about the AO3 tag implementation from the start, though I've only this week managed to articulate it. The problem there, of course, is that it would involve a Whole Lot Of Work to even begin to differentiate between index and label use; even if the interface was made to do it, most authors wouldn't want to bother; but they'd sure raise hell if someone did it for them! Which leaves only the separation of tags into different reading fields (for pairing, for character, for freeform), to ease the overload of ten to twenty tags on one story. This was abandoned once already, in design, presumably in favor of a more "light weight" blurb, but I think that was a mistake; and the compromise of highlighting the pairings really doesn't ameliorate the problem much. And, in response to this I suspect, a lot of people are not tagging their work nearly as comprehensively as it should be tagged for indexing purposes--from the reader side, the tags look like labels, after all.
It's like LOC subject headings. They're wonderfully useful to search with, if you're familiar with the nomenclature, but they're never shown in the mini-record you see in search results.
Short form: The two uses are really not the same at all.
I, for example, have tended to use tags as labels. In this usage, they need to be clear, minimal and not redundant, which leads to, for example, not tagging with a character name when that name is already included in a pairing.
On the other hand, tagging to index calls for every last bit of information imaginable, and welcomes redundancy. After all, the tags are now supposed to make the story findable along multiple axes of search.
Using searchable tags for indexing makes all kinds of sense, and I am, in fact, banging on some code to add a whole bunch of searchables to my personal archive. But part of the banging involves actually hiding the tags in question most of the time, because index-tags should not all be shown in the story blurb/summary/whathaveyou. That's the place for labels, instead. Index-tags in a label-tag context are massive information overload, and the redundancy that makes them useful for indexing just makes them hard to wade through as labels.
This is one of the things that's bugged me about the AO3 tag implementation from the start, though I've only this week managed to articulate it. The problem there, of course, is that it would involve a Whole Lot Of Work to even begin to differentiate between index and label use; even if the interface was made to do it, most authors wouldn't want to bother; but they'd sure raise hell if someone did it for them! Which leaves only the separation of tags into different reading fields (for pairing, for character, for freeform), to ease the overload of ten to twenty tags on one story. This was abandoned once already, in design, presumably in favor of a more "light weight" blurb, but I think that was a mistake; and the compromise of highlighting the pairings really doesn't ameliorate the problem much. And, in response to this I suspect, a lot of people are not tagging their work nearly as comprehensively as it should be tagged for indexing purposes--from the reader side, the tags look like labels, after all.
It's like LOC subject headings. They're wonderfully useful to search with, if you're familiar with the nomenclature, but they're never shown in the mini-record you see in search results.
