💬 Some ideas about tags, categories, and metadata for online commonplace books and search

Replied to Some ideas about tags, categories, and metadata for online commonplace books and search by Chris AldrichChris Aldrich (BoffoSocko)

Then I ought to do a bit of clean up within the tags themselves which have gotten unwieldy and often have spelling mistakes which cause searches to potentially fail. I also find that some of my auto-tagging processes by importing tags from the original sources’ pages could be cleaned up as well, though those are generally stored in a different location on my website, so it’s not as big a deal to me.

It is interesting to read your thoughts Chris and reflect on my own habits. When I moved my main blog from Blogger to WordPress, I added four categories based on the work on ATC21s:

  • Ways of thinking. Creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, decision-making and learning
  • Ways of working. Communication and collaboration
  • Tools for working. Information and communications technology (ICT) and information literacy
  • Skills for living in the world. Citizenship, life and career, and personal and social responsibility

I find it interesting to consider when writing, but never really utilise them to be honest. Tags continued as before, often involving a mixture of themes, topics and authors mentioned.

With my new ‘commonplace’ blog, I focused on three categories:

  • Responses
  • Contributions
  • Creations

In regards to tags, I try and restrict myself to three tags. Again, this is often a mixture of author, topics and themes.

I too suffer with some incorrect spellings which I too should fix up … one day.

I am interested in your process of auto-tagging? I sometimes copy the tags included in the ‘response properties’, but at the moment it just becomes another thing to copy. If you have a more automated process, I would be interested.

One response on “💬 Some ideas about tags, categories, and metadata for online commonplace books and search”

  1. Sam Twyford-Moore discusses the creative use of Twitter by Teju Cole to tell short stories and describe situations. This is seen to be in contrast to longer forms of writing. I was reminded of the #ShortStories that pepper my feed in Mastadon. The discussion of ergodic versus canonical writing was also interesting. This seems similar to discussions of commonplace books.

    Social media and the internet could now be seen as our workbooks, where we can test out ideas that we later refine in print or book form. I have drafted and conceptualised several essays in the comments section of other people’s literary blogs (an essay on the Wire published in this journal originated in a thread on James Bradley’s City of Tongues blog). But I want to suggest here that Twitter can be the work as much as the workbook, recalling video-game academic Espen Aarseth’s useful distinction between ‘ergodic writing i.e. writing still emergently based in evolving energy, and canonical writing e.g. unchangeably published’.

    I capture this difference by having two spaces: Read Write Respond and Read Write Collect. I like like the way Ian O’Byrne captures this difference:

    On this website you’ll find a trail of my digital breadcrumbs as I consume, curate, and create. I’ll archive all of the things I’ve read online. These could be bookmarks to visit, videos to watch, photos, and quotes that inspired me.

    Reply

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