[Textop-en-phil] [Textop] FAQ posted

[Brittney Brokenshire]

Mr. Sanger asked me to forward this email to the list to be answered/debated.

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Hi Larry,

I read through your FAQs and just because I had this argument a few
days ago with some of my friends, I'm unconvinced of your answer on
tagging.

As far as I understand you ARE asking experts to tag information just
in an inefficient manner - not to imply that's necessarily a bad
thing.  The tags you are asking them to give are:  a fine-grained
categorization, a linguistic function, a summary, and the source
information - all meta data and each can be represented as a tag.

I understand why you need to have an agreed set of tags for the
categorization, but the highly touted ESP game results in an agreed
set of tags for images http://www.espgame.org/. So that can't be the
biggest barrier.

The question I've had is why you chose to break apart an existing text
and put it into an outline, as opposed to marking up the text with
tags which is similar to the low-tech method I used in my textbooks.

The conclusion I came to was because of the benefits of the unique
view, allowing people to make new connections within and between
domains. And that collaborative tagging technology just isn't there
yet for the purposes of text-op.

My husband is working on his masters thesis in a related area and
we've brainstormed on many parts, and found that there are really no
tools we know of that allow you, even personally, to tag text at the
paragraph or sentence level...let alone have many people collaborate
on it.  I think the closest we get to this is something like
del.icio.us http://del.icio.us/.

I think you could accomplish the goals of text-op through a smartly
designed tagging system, however the current technology fails to meet
the criteria of collaborative, limited categorization and sentence
level granularity, thus another method, at least for the pilot
project, needed to be found.

In my experience wikis are best used for rapid co-creation of
content, but I don't view text-op as a content creation problem,
rather as a meta-data problem (maybe this is wrong, but in my head it
seems a better fit) - which seems to be the bottleneck in loads of
web-based research at the moment.  Hopefully some better tools for
this type of problem will arise in the next few years - maybe even out
of my husband's research lab or one of my many pet projects .

So that was my internal argument, and I thought you might garner
something from that, even if it is just how off base I am.  As I found
out if you have to try to convince computer science people of the
validity of this project...tagging will be one of the major hangups.

---Brittney