Processes of tagging behaviors : case studies of CiteULike, LibraryThing, YouTube and Flickr

Abstract

This work is a study of tagging behavior processes in different types of documents and tagging sites. Moreover, the tagging challenges are addressed following tagging behavior processes. The study is limited to CiteULike, LibraryThing, YouTube and Flickr as case studies. However, tagging behavior processes and tagging challenges are concentrated rather than evaluation of the above tagging sites. To define the processes of tagging behavior and the tagging challenges, the talk aloud experiments have been conducted to the informants who are real taggers in various tagging sites such as Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Picasa as well as some other personal blog. The surveys of tagging experience and open interviews have also taken a long with the experiments. The results of this study show that there are 2 main types of taggers: confident taggers and certainty taggers. Those types of taggers have different behaviors and feeling during tagging. Moreover, the process of video and image tagging is distinguished with text tagging. Most of the informants felt simpler and easier to tag for pictures and videos than text since the videos and pictures are visible and easier to understand. According to the processes, there will be 4 main tagging issues such as information resources issues, tagging function issues, vocabularies issues and patience in tagging. The findings in the thesis could be a useful reference for building tagging systems in practices. Besides, the thesis might be used as hypothesis of tagging behavior to other relevant researches.