Assignment #3 - Defending remix culture? Art history can help

By Andrea Soler

This visual essay will show how remix – in the sense of appropriation – has been present in art history for centuries. Through a combination of digitally-collaged images and quotes about remix, this series of images addresses the question: Is the remix culture fundamentally at odds with older media institutions and practices?

 The challenge of producing 20 images, instead of curating existing images, makes Gilberto Gil’s quote “Nobody creates in a vacuum” in RIP: A Remix Manifesto truly comprehensible. Taking, using and modifying existing content is now ingrained in our digital culture. Creating new content, even if it is a collage of existing one, could be daunting. However, this visual essay will illustrate how remix existed long before the advent digital media.

Flickr link to photo set:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/78193356@N07/sets/72157643387323723/

1. The following images will show how the act of remixing in the sense of appropriating to create something different has been around for centuries. These series of images mainly focus in the visual arts, while touching on fashion, music, technology and TV.

 


2. The remix is “a conscious process used to innovate and create. In fact, it’s no exaggeration to say that the cut-‘n’-paste culture born out of sampling and remixing has revolutionized the way we interpret the world” (Mason, 2008, p. 71).



3. The word “remix” is no longer about music alone, it is a fluid movement that captures how society participates and creates. According to Guertin (2012) “reflexive remixing creates a unique and original work from pre-existing parts” (p. 120).
Girl Talk photo by Moses Namkung CC / Chef John Horne by photo by Renée Suen CC

 

 4. If “Remixing is about taking something that already exists and redefining it in your own personal creative space, reinterpreting someone else’s work your way” (Mason, 2008, p. 71), then remixing is present throughout history.
Food truck client: My father / Cropped gallery photo by Kyoss Magazin

 

 5. The history of art is full of examples of how remixing existed long before the digital era. Most art movements know as “isms” like Realism, Impressionism, pointillism and Modernism are reactions and reinterpretations of previous artistic movements.

 


 6. ...Impressionism was once controversial.




 7. Creative expressions and avant-garde movements as Cubism have been met with opposition before being accepted. With the benefit of time we begin to understand the context of why these artistic changes happened, what triggered them and most importantly what they set in motion.

 


 8. In 1913 Duchamp created the first ready-made by mounting a bicycle wheel on a stool, followed by the “Urinal” a few years later. Much like the remix, “ready-mades illustrate the proposition that the work of an artist consists essentially of the assembling of pre-existing materials” (Britt, 1989, p. 306).

 


 9. After Duchamp everything was possible, including movements like pop art, which in the sixties appropriated popular images of mass culture and transferred them to the art world. Warhol is a good example.



10. Even controversial artist Damien Hirst and his famous formaldehyde shark, used Duchamp’s conceptual remix (appropriation) of existing materials/works as a foundation for his work. A few years earlier Jeff Koons had a similar approach with his “Three Ball 50/50 Tank.” Shark photo by Gazanfarulla Khan C



11. In contemporary art almost everything is product of “spheres of influence across centuries of art history”(Guetin, 2012, p. 121). Contemporary art often refers to existing artwork to create a statement that is relevant to our time or to question previous beliefs. A creative spiral.



12. In a similar way that pop art appropriated images from mass culture and TV and brought them to the art world, so too we have seen how TV and movies have taken ideas and stories from books and comics.



13. This applies to arts, literature, music, theater, movies, TV and even fashion and media technology.



14. According to Mason (2008) fashion illustrates how encouraging remixing, copying, and reinventing can trigger creativity and innovation. “Without any intellectual property protection, a ferocious multibillion-dollar industry thrives and survives because designers share ideas and are free to remix the works of others (p. 96)



15. Says Gilberto Gil, Brazil’s former Minister of Culture during the RIP: A remix manifesto (2008).



16. Media technology is not an exception to this remix culture. In “Everything is a Remix – Case Study of the iPhone” (2014) Ferguson illustrates how despite iPhone’s innovation many of its initial functions purposely resembled other technologies (keyboard sounded like a typewriter, iBooks displayed on virtual shelves).



17. Ferguson (2014) says that as people got used to smartphone technology, Google’s Android operating system evolved Apple’s iPhone ideas moving away from resembling older technologies. In turn iPhones evolved Android’s ideas. According to Ferguson everything is remix.



18. Beyond technology’s fight for market share, remixing is about creating and participating for the joy of it. Guertin states “it is the experience of the act of sharing creation – the process of circulating – that has become the aesthetic of production for the multitude in a digital age”(2012, p. 124).



19. Creative Commons licenses are an option for creative people who like sharing their work and allowing others to make something different out of it. These licenses are meant to work alongside traditional copyright laws. Wonder what Warhol would have thought about it?



20. Can we say that the remix culture is fundamentally at odds with older media institutions and practices, when we have witnessed the presence of remix in centuries of art history and culture? Quoting Jean Luc Godard, Guertin (2012) highlights the essence of remix: it is were it takes us, its creative potential. Godard photo by Garry Stevens CC



References: Britt, D. (Ed.). (1989). Modern art: Impressionism to Post-Modernism. Spain: Bulfinch Press.

Ferguson, K. (2014). Everything is a remix – Case study of the iPhone [Video]. Retrieved from http://everythingisaremix.info/blog/everything-is-a-remix-case-study-the-iphone

Gaylor, B. (Director/Writer), EyeSteelFilm & National Film Board of Canada (Co-Producers). (2008). RIP: A remix manifesto. (Documentary). Canada.

Guertin, C. (2012). Digital prohibition: Piracy and authorship in new media art. New York, NY: Continuum International Pub.

Mason, M. (2008). The pirate’s dilemma: How youth culture is reinventing capitalism. New York, NY: Free Press.

Flickr link to photo set
https://www.flickr.com/photos/78193356@N07/sets/72157643387323723/

Andrea Soler's storify - #NMN review

Nicole Basaraba's Storify: Transmedia

Overall I learned a lot about transliteracy, technobiophilia, and transmedia this semester. The New Media Narratives course really inspired my personal, professional, and academic pursuits.  I wish there was a #NMN2.0 so I could learn more about these areas, but I will continue to do so on my own time. The following is a Storify highlighting three areas I focused my attention on in the #NMN course.

Diana Brown's Week #12 Review: Transliteracy

Here is my review of #transliteracy, which was an important #NMN course theme. I was able to find a range of sources across a variety of platforms (naturally!) about this topic. I think that this summary accurately captures what we learned about #transliteracy and builds on this topic with videos, tweets, blog entries, images, Facebook groups and slideshares. My #storify begins with working definitions of #transliteracy and moves into applications of #transliteracy in the realm of education. My storify ends with a thought-provoking quote about teaching and learning in our #transliterate 21st Century world. Enjoy!

Assignment #2 Collective Intelligence – The Impact and Benefits of Nature

By: Jonathan Krywulak

Green Fix

In this article, Naomi Lubick suggests that although past research has made a compelling case for the healing affects of nature, the direct causes related to “nature’s curative powers” (2013, p. 42) has been difficult to determine due to the medial field largely overlooking it. Lubick references E.O. Wilson who suggested nature’s restorative benefits to human beings is the result of an evolutionary process between the natural world and the human mind.  This helps to explain our “innate preference for such scenery and provide(s) clues as to why such scenes might trigger restorative brain responses” (p. 42), even if those scenes are artificially constructed.  This can possibly explain why simulated natural environments help people recover faster (deceases in heart rate and stress) in hospitals or feel better in office settings.  Artificial images of nature have the ability to generate a response from the human brain that can result in a variety of psychological and physical health benefits. According to Lubick,  “faking nature will help us hone in on exactly how the real things might be promoting healing, but more importantly, it might help bring nature’s benefits to those of us trapped in places where nature cannot follow”  (p. 44).  As technology advances, it will be interesting to see how nature continues to be simulated in the not so natural world.

Biophilia: Does Visual Contact with Nature Impact on Health and Well-Being?

Bjorn Grinde and Grete Grindal Patil examine the influence plants and other aspects of the natural world have on the human mind.  They suggest that like all other species, humans “have been shaped by forces of evolution” (2009, p. 2333) and it was particularly early in history that humans and the natural world were closely united in order to survive.  It was during this time, according to Grinde and Patil, that plants became an integral part of the human environment, thus evolving alongside the human mind.  Based on this theoretical perspective it is thought that humans “have adapted to live in a green environment” (p. 2333), and any deviation away from the environment may result in unsettling affects such as disease or reduced life quality.  I found this part of the article most interesting as provides a possible reason as to why humans seem to be more calm, comfortable, and balanced (in mind, body, & spirit) when they see or are around nature.  By being close to plants, people are experiencing what they always been accustomed to since early history.  I think in many ways this serves to explain why people have an urge to be around nature and why often times their health and well-being benefit as a result of being around it.  As noted by Grinde and Patil’s, “nature appears to have qualities useful for stress relief, mental restoration, and improved mood simply by being consciously or unconsciously “pleasing to the eye” (p. 2336).  Interaction with plants both indoors and outdoors are encouraged as it serves to benefit the human body and mind.

The Human Relation with Nature and Technological Nature

In this article, Peter Kahn questions whether or not it matters for the physical and psychological wellbeing of humans that actual nature is being replaced by technological nature. He argues that it does matter and his analysis of the question raises the concern that as we move away from actual nature “the baseline across generations for what counts as a full measure of the human experience and of human flourishing” will be lowered.  This may substantially affect the human connection to the natural world and have a negative impact on the physical and psychological well-being of humans.  In his study using plasma HDTV’s to simulate nature, Kahn came to the conclusion that real nature is better than technological nature however technological nature is in many ways better than no nature at all. The general trend provided by research suggested that “interacting with technological nature provides some but not all the enjoyments and benefits of interacting with actual nature” (2009, p. 41).   I agree with this statement as I think technology can afford humans a lot of different opportunities to connect and experience the natural world. Various technological tools have the ability to create mood and provide imagery that people can resonate with, however, I feel that interacting with real nature can generate greater benefits as it relates to physical and psychological well-being.

References

My Delicious link:
 https://delicious.com/jkreek

Lubick, N. (2013). Green fix. New Scientist, 218(2921), 42-44. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0262407913615018

Grinde, B., & Patil, GG. (2009). Biophilia: Does visual contact with nature impact on health and well-being? International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 6(9), p. 2332-2343. Retrieved from https://docs.google.com/a/ualberta.ca/file/d/0B21EMxFJbDZ6bnVuVldDQ28xbWs/edit?pli=1

Kahn, P., Severson, R., & Ruckert, J. (2009). The human relation with nature and technological nature. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, p. 37–42. Retrieved from http://depts.washington.edu/hints/publications/Human_Relation_Technological_Nature.pdf

Collective Intelligence: Assignment 2 - Is biophilia present in media technology and in our use of social media?

By: Andrea Soler

It has been 30 years since E. O. Wilson coined the term biophilia to talk about our “innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes” (quoted by Thomas, 2013, p. 10). Today, we can see examples of this love for life, as Wilson liked to describe it, everywhere in our architecture, interior design and arts.

More than a tendency, Kellert and Wilson believe that biophilia was “biologically encoded deep in our past at a time when sensitivity to sensory signals was crucial to our survival” (p. 123).  As the environment in which we need to survive has changed, so have our manifestations of biophilia. Based on this, Susan Thomas has developed the concept of technobiophilia applying biophilia to technology (p. 12). From interfaces, game designs and technological lingo, to our phenomenological experiences when we interact online, Thomas says that there are many expressions of biophilia in our modern technological life.

Elaborating on Thomas’s concept, I wonder if there is a resemblance between lifelike processes and our use of media technology and social media. To find some guidance to this question, I looked at three research sources: Jussi Parikka’s theories about insect media, Christakis’s TED talk about how epidemics move through social networks, and a video animation of how the flu virus enters and spreads through the human body.

In his book “Insect media: An archeology of animals and technology” (2010) Jussi Parikka looks at how insects and animals have been source of inspiration for military technology and strategies, media technology, software design and even mass communication. As an example, Parikka points out how in the 19^th century the telegraph system was compared to a spider web, not only because of the threads of its cables but because of how the system functioned by sensing the movement of information. 

Photo by: Gradders52 CC License

For Parikka (2010) insect media is not about creating metaphors such as parasite computing or bug/virus attack that aim to naturalize a cybernetic construction (p. xxi), for him it is about animals and insects having media qualities themselves. If “media is a contraction of forces of the world into specific resonating milieus” (p. xiv) and animals and insects have the faculty to transmit, record and connect, then media is not limited to human communication.

Parikka observes that insects “live in media,” as their world requires them to be always sensing, interacting and transmitting, similarly to how humans are always communicating through media technology (p. xxvii).  For Parikka the concept of media is much broader than to be a human extension, for him animals and insects are also media.

Moving from insects to epidemics, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler have been applying network theory to figure out “How social networks predict epidemics” as presented by Christakis during his 2010 TED talk. By looking at how humans connect through social networks, the researchers have been able to observe and map how people influence each other depending on their position in the network and their relationship. The study of social networks can help visualize how social contagions, which can take the form of germs, viruses, patriotism, altruism, religion, obesity, purchasing trends, etc., works and spreads.  

Christakis 2010 TED Talk - CC License

Although the presentation focuses on how epidemics spread, what is most interesting for the purpose of my question is to be able to visualize how information moves within social networks. This presentation makes me wonder if, in the same way that viruses survive by moving from one host to the next by using social networks, have humans also learned to spread information (news, gossip, opinions, trends, etc.) by mimicking this contagion behaviour in their use of social media? 

To see if there is indeed a resemblance in how viruses spread and how we communicate through social media, I looked at Robert Krulwich and medical animator David Bolinsky’s video “Flu attack! How a virus invades your body” (2009).  This animation illustrates how the virus enters the body and tricks the cells into making millions more viruses to spread the viral information, while in the mean time the defense system reacts and restores order.

To say that the way humans move information through social media is similar to how a virus spreads based only on superficial associations from a video is not possible. However, there are a few observations and similarities that are worth mentioning. For example, the process of acceptance of the virus into the cell by having the proper “key” seems similar to the process of introductions into social networks. The way the virus spreads – by making contact with other cells that create millions of copies of the same virus – resembles how ideas or opinions are shared and spread in social media. Finally, the way the body’s immune system reacts to restore order reminded me of how often wrong information gets corrected within the network, usually by better-informed individuals. Although these observations might be far-fetched, they could also be food for thought.

Polio Virus - Photo by: Sanofi Pasteur - CC license

In conclusion, the three sources indicate that there is potential for further research in this area. Jussi Parikka’s theories show that there are non-human biophilic elements in media (although he does not use that term) and expands my narrow view of media as a human tool.

Researchers study how epidemics spread using the same network theories and mapping as they do for the diffusion of opinions, innovations and behaviours. This suggests that there might be an association between how different lifelike forms (such as viruses) and humans connect that is worth exploring. This possibility is further reinforced when we compare and see the similarities of how viruses move inside and outside the human body to spread.

In particular, Parikka’s comment “could we not (only) ask how nature is evident in our media cultures but what in media technology is already present in nature” (Parikka, 2010, p. xxi) leads me to believe that there are indeed technobiophilic elements in our design of media technology and use of social media systems.

Reference list:

Christakis N. (2010). How social networks predict epidemics. TED talk. Retrieved from:

http://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_christakis_how_social_networks_predict_epidemics

Krulwich R. & Bolinsky’s D. (2009). Flu attack! How a virus invades your body  [Video file]. Retrieved from:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/06/01/114075029/flu-attack-how-a-virus-invades-your-body

Parikka, J. (2010). Insect media: An archaeology of animals and technology. Introduction: Insects in the age of technology (pp. ix -xxxiv). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Thomas, S. (2013). Technobiophilia: Nature and cyberspace. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Delicious account:

https://delicious.com/andreasolerpava

Assignment 2 – Collective Intelligence

Bringing Nature to Kids through Technology

For this assignment I decided to look at the idea of using technology to help children experience nature. All three of the articles/ videos that I examined encompass the themes of nature, technobiophilia, and transliteracy.

In his TED talk “A teacher growing green in the South Bronx”, teacher Stephen Ritz talks about how he and his students teamed with Green Living Technologies, a company that develops technology for green roofs and green walls, in order to build an indoor edible wall in their South Bronx classroom. Green Living’s technology allows plants to grown in an urban setting, both inside and outside. Ritz states that the edible wall allowed all of his students to participate in this farming exercise. He says, “I wanted to figure out how I could get this kind of success into something small, like this, and bring it into my classroom so that handicapped kids could do it, kids who didn't want to be outside could do it, and everyone could have access…And lo and behold, we gave birth to the first edible wall in New York City” (Ritz, Jan. 2012). The food the students grew was served to students and teachers in the school cafeteria. Students were also encouraged to graze directly off the wall whenever they wanted. They had access to fresh vegetables during school hours that they grew themselves.

Ritz’s students were so inspired by their green wall, that they went on to build and design more walls and roofs, and they got paid for their efforts. Ritz discusses one case, which seems to embody technobiophilia, where his students designed and installed a green wall on the John Hancock building in Boston. Ritz states that “And my kids, from the poorest congressional district in America, became the first to install a green wall, designed by a computer, with real-live learning tools, 21 stories up” (Ritz, Jan. 2012). Some of Ritz’s students have become licensed Green Living installers, and have gone onto work with contractors in their neighborhood who build affordable housing. Through this introduction to green technology, and what they have learned about growing food, Ritz’s students have been able to transform their neighborhood, their school, and their future.

In her Ted talk “Using tech to enable dreaming” Shilo Shiv Suleman also discusses how children can use technology to enhance their experience with nature. Suleman states that she felt that technology was killing imagination. She felt that cellphones and digital cameras had “stopped us from dreaming. They stopped us from being inspired. And so I jumped…into this world of technology, to see how I could use it to enable magic as opposed to kill it” (Suleman, Dec. 2011).

Suleman did this by designing an interactive iPad app called Khoya, which allows children to become immersed in a digital fantasy adventure story. She states that she realized that the iPad was the perfect storytelling device – a transmedia storytelling device – because it could connect readers all over the world, plus the device can tell the way it’s being held, and it has a GPS so it can tell where the reader lives. She states that digital storytelling allows for transliteracy because “It brings together image and text and animation and sound and touch. Storytelling is becoming more and more multi-sensorial” (Suleman, Dec. 2011). In terms of technobiophilia, as part of the interactive digital story, readers are asked to go outside and take pictures with their iPad of nature – like flowers or leaves - and upload the photos online, where they can share with other readers around the world. Suleman states that “now with mobile technology, we can actually take our children outside into the natural world with their technology.” (Suleman, Dec. 2011). She feels that we are moving towards a world where nature and technology are becoming closer, stating that “We're bringing our children and ourselves closer to the natural world and that magic and joy and childhood love that we had through the simple medium of a story” (Suleman, Dec. 2011).

In her article “Get Your Students Outside With Technology”, Patty McGinnis discusses how technology, students and nature can be a ‘winning combination’. McGinnis writes how the creation on an interpretive trail helped her students interact with nature while using technology to “create a product that would be beneficial to the community” (McGinnis, p.59, 2014). This exercise allowed her students to become transliterate because it “addressed many 21st-century learning skills while making learning relevant and providing students with an authentic audience for their work” (McGinnis, p.59, 2014). Students were tasked with creating numbered posts that contained a quick response (QR) code to be placed along a nature trail. A QR code contains an embedded URL, that when scanned with a smart phone takes the user to a student created Web site. Each student made their own QR codes and created their own Web sites which contained text information, photos and student created videos explaining different points of interest along the trail.

During this exercise, students were required to become familiar with different types of technology, along with their life-sciences course content. Students were placed into small working groups, and each group had to record their point of interest along the trail on Google Sites. McGinnis explains that “Students were made editors of the site, which enabled them to add information about their point of interest to their page” (McGinnis, p.60, 2014). Students were encouraged to use "text, images, podcasts and videos when discussing their points of interest” (McGinnis, p.59, 2014) on their sites, plus they learned how to place a marker on their point of interest on Google Maps. This exercise seems like a great example also of Dr. Sue Thomas’s definition of technobiophilia, because students were encouraged to “achieve a ‘tech-nature’ balance through practical experiments designed to enhance…digital lives indoors, outdoors, and online” (Thomas, July 2013).

My Delicious site is: https://delicious.com/nawoods

References:
McGinnis, P. (2014). GET YOUR STUDENTS OUTSIDE WITH TECHNOLOGY!. Science Scope, 37(7), 58-64.

Ritz, S. (2012). A teacher growing green in South Bronx. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_ritz_a_teacher_growing_green_in_the_south_bronx

Suleman, S. (2011). Using tech to enable dreaming. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/shilo_shiv_suleman_using_tech_to_enable_dreaming?quote=1330

Thomas, S. (2013). Technobiophilia: Nature and Cyberspace. Retrieved from http://suethomasnet.wordpress.com/technobiophilia/

Collective Intelligence Assignment #2: Cyberspace and Cybersecurity

With the tremendous growth of the internet and the proliferation of devices used for every aspect of our personal and business lives, we must conclude that cyberspace and along with it, cybersecurity, are here to stay. Cybersecurity has become a huge and very complicated issue.

The 1998 video “Caught in the Web: Staying Safe in Cybersafe”  (The Found Footage Festival, 1998) looks back on what seems to be a simpler time while educating parents, kids and teens about the dangers of online predators. Cyberspace safety issues regarding chat rooms, games, shopping, viruses, pornography, criminals and child predators have already been identified.

The 2014 CNBC News Report Video “Mistakes Businesses are still making in Cyberspace” (CNBC, 2014) indicates that businesses are complacent about cybersecurity and cyberspace safety of their intellectual property and customer data. Very large companies such has Target and Barclays have been hacked. This cybersecurity issue is not new; businesses simply have not allocated resources to move cybersecurity issues to priority levels.

The Government of Canada Get Cyber Safe (Government of Canada, 2014) website showcases thought leadership; it has an excellent framework of current resources to educate parents, teens, and small/medium businesses. We all know that the rapidly growing internet and cyberspace make the world smaller and very connected. Everyone is involved: everyone needs to be part of the solution: government, businesses and individuals. The biggest issue parents and teens now face is cyberbullying: hating online has caused teenage suicides. In addition this website links out to cyber-security risk pages for Mobile, Banking and Finance, Social Networking, Email, Online Gaming and Entertainment, VoIP, Downloading and File Sharing and Shopping Online. There is a Get Cyber Safe Blog and more current resources for downloading. This website showcases how the internet and cyberspace touches every aspect of our personal and business lives.

The message is clear; the world has changed. Parents, Teens, and businesses need to take ownership and work cooperatively with government agencies getting the message out and learning how to live safely in our very complex and rapidly evolving global, cyberspace world.

CNBC. (2014, February 18). Mistakes businesses are still making in cyberspace. (J. Schlesinger, Producer) Retrieved March 16, 2014, from CNBC : http://www.cnbc.com/id/101419109

Government of Canada. (2014). Get Cyber Safe. Retrieved March 16, 2014, from Get Cyber Safe: http://www.getcybersafe.gc.ca/index-eng.aspx

The Found Footage Festival. (1998). Caught In The Web: Staying Safe In Cyberspace. Retrieved March 16, 2014, from The Found Footage Festival: http://www.foundfootagefest.com/2014/01/caught-in-the-web-staying-safe-in-cybersafe/

Collective intelligence Assignment #2 – Can social cataloguing aid library metadata creation?

By Nicole Basaraba

Social tagging, or folksonomy (a portmanteau of folk and taxonomy) coined by Thomas Vander Wal is a form of participatory literacy. It gained popularity in 2003 with the social bookmarking site “del.icio.is” (Lu, Park & Hu, 2010) and two of the largest websites employing social tagging and focusing on books are LibraryThing and Goodreads. Social tagging is a process where users add metadata often termed tags or keywords to content.

The three texts (book marked on my delicious account) I chose to examine are: 

1. a YouTube video which shows how social tagging works in LibraryThing,
2. a journal article that explores whether social tagging in LibraryThing is comparable or useful for expert-created subject headings for the Library of Congress, and
3. a blog that outlines why Goodreads – which relies more on non-textual metadata – rather than LibraryThing is the largest social book sharing website.  

These texts showed that social cataloguing, while uncontrolled, can help: Internet users personalize their workflow, contribute new terms to standardized library taxonomies, and help people form communities online.

Video: “What is social cataloguing?” – Tim Spalding

In this video Tim Spalding mocks his own ethos. He has Classics degree, but describes his creation of LibraryThing as “Library Science practiced without a degree”.

Spalding started LibraryThing in 2005 and now it is a company based in Portland, Maine with over 1.7 million users and 88 million books catalogued. It adds books from 690 libraries around the world and from Amazon.

Spalding defines social cataloguing as a situation where “personal cataloguing goes social”. His definition is vague, but he explains that LibraryThing’s main purpose is for personal cataloguing where users can add any tags they think describe the book’s topic and content. It displays information in an ‘Excel sheet’ type format with detailed information including book author, title, ISBN, book awards, and other categories. Spalding emphasizes that LibraryThing does not suggest tags so that users organically generate all the tags. With this system, users can search for books and view and interact with someone else’s library allowing members to grow into a community.

In addition to the community aspect, Spalding notes that the personal cataloguing reveals a lot about a person. The tag cloud shows users’ topical interests and the statistical metadata provides users with insight about themselves.

Journal Article: “User Tags versus Subject Headings: Can User-Supplied Data Improve Subject Access to Library Collections?” - Caimei Lu, Jung-ran Park, and Xiaohua Hu, Drexel University, USA

Lu, Park and Hu (2010) conducted a study comparing social tags created by users from the LibraryThing website with the Library of Congress subject headings determined by expert cataloguers. Since social cataloguing is unregulated, researchers are concerned with the quality of the tags.

Figure 1. Benefits and limitations of expert-created compared to socially-created metadata.

	Expert created metadata (Library of Congress subject headings)	Social cataloguing (LibraryThing tags)
Benefits	High quality Limited scope	Time efficient More consensus on subject scope Adaptable to new vocabulary
Limitations	Costly to produce	Uncontrolled/limitless

Experts apply controlled vocabularies to metadata to summarize resources after reading the books so this process is time consuming and costly. The language used for Library of Congress subject headings (LCSHs) is limited because it is often highly technical and specialized, which requires users to have knowledge on these terms in order to search for books (Lu, Park & Hu, 2010, p. 764).  

Social tagging doesn’t involve any metadata standards and users apply their own descriptors. Since this threshold is lowered, a large number of resources can be tagged in a short amount of time (Lu, Park & Hu, 2010, p. 764). Social tags can include new popularized vocabulary, non-dictionaries words, and words that have meaning only to the individual user.

For example, in del.icio.us we used the tags “NMN” and “For:JessL” for this assignment so that we could find each other’s content and links. However, these tags don’t really mean anything to anyone else who hasn’t taken the course before. A study by Kipp and Campbell found that more than 16% of del.icio.us tags were non-subject terms, which suggests that users want to attach personal resource management information to documents or books to make searching for them easier (Lu, Park & Hu, 2010, p. 772).

The key finding in Lu, Park and Hu’s study (2010) between the two cataloguing systems is that “overlapping terms only comprise a small portion (about 2.2%) of the entire tag vocabulary. That is, about 97.8% of [user-generated] tags cannot be found in LCSHs for the same collection of books” (p. 770). This demonstrates that uncontrolled tagging results in limitless categories.

Lu, Park and Hu (2010) came to three main conclusions:

• “user-generated tags may help bridge the gap between professional and public discourse by providing a source of terms not included in authorized terminologies and controlled vocabularies […]
• social taggers might help enhance the subject access to library collections by describing library resources with terms different than those used by experts […]
• users view classification as a holistic process closely tied to themselves and their work” (p. 776-777).

In other words, although social tagging is uncontrolled, it can help: contribute to expert-created metadata, improve online search ability for books, and add an element of personalization for individual users’ work. 

Blog: “Social cataloguing – a discussion on LibraryThing and Goodreads” – Simon Barron, Librarian

LibraryThing and Goodreads are the two most popular social cataloguing websites. Goodreads surpasses LibraryThing with approximately 17 million users and 550 million books (Barron, 2013), which raises the question as to whether Goodreads is superior to LibraryThing.

Simon Barron notes that Goodreads focuses more on the social networking aspect because it has a more visual interface than LibraryThing’s text-based user interface. Barron’s description of the two networks can be understood from a phenomenological perspective. Barron notes that design may be a major factor in Goodreads’ popularity:

“Goodreads tends more towards the use of terminology related to cataloguing print materials and to old paradigms of organisation: 'shelves', 'friends', 'community' are familiar and comforting words associated with cosy, physical libraries and lovely, welcoming bookshops. LibraryThing, by contrast, uses words that actually apply to digital materials and which, while more technically accurate, are less welcoming: 'collections', 'members', 'contacts', etc.” (para. 10).

While Goodreads is more popular, LibraryThing’s metadata provides more intelligent book recommendations for each user based on the books in their library rather than Goodreads, which relies on the user attributing star ratings (1-5).

Barron concludes that social cataloguing: allows users to organize books quickly and easily, removes the reliance on trained cataloguers, and makes cataloguing more subjective, democratized and social.

Conclusions

LibraryThing is advantageous for users because it: gives them a personalized digital library where they can easily search for books according to their own semantics, allows them to learn more about books they’ve read, and provides greater insight into their own interests. LibraryThing’s focus on organic user-developed tags creates categories or new taxonomies that could potentially be used by libraries to enhance search ability for books. For example, Spalding (in the second video) gives is the fiction genre “cyberpunk” – a category not recognized by the Library of Congress, which instead uses the “Science Fiction”.

Goodreads surpasses LibraryThing in terms of number of users and books because the website design allows it’s users to engage in more phenomenologically familiar and simplified book sharing and reviewing practices. However, LibraryThing’s social cataloguing is superior because the metadata provides better book recommendations and more detailed information on titles.

There is potential for libraries to incorporate social tagging into their cataloguing to improve search ability and user interaction. For example, the University of Pennsylvania created ‘Penntags’, a locally developed software for social bookmarking; the Ann Arbor District Library developed the ‘Social Online Public Access Catalog’; and Danbury Library was the first to incorporate LibraryThing widgets into its catalogue (Lu, Park & Hu, 2010).

New media technologies allow users to create their own ‘narratives’ as they can assign personalized tags and meaning to works they’ve read. They can do this quickly to a large volume of books and it allows them to improve personal search efficiencies. This online participation (literary smart mob) democratizes book taxonomy into a folksonomy and creates online communities and shared knowledge, which contributes to everyone’s digital literacies.

References

Barron, S. (2013, August 6). Social cataloguing: a discussion on LibraryThing and Goodreads. Undaimonia. Retrieved from http://undaimonia.blogspot.ca/2013/08/social-cataloguing-discussion-on.html

LibraryThing. Retrived from https://www.librarything.com

Lu, C., Park, J., and Hu, X. (2010). User tags versus expert-assigned subject terms: A comparison of LibraryThing tags and Library of Congress Subject Headings. Journal of Information Science, 36 (p. 763-779).

Spalding, T (Speaker). (2009, November 30). LibraryThingTim [Episode 1/6]. What is Social Cataloging? Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCU_UkUKZI8

Spalding, T (Speaker). (2009, December 1). LibraryThingTim [Episode 2/6]. What is Social Cataloging?. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kt94e9mX320