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 – 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