The much-loved, long-suspended “Tag Mirror” feature is back!
Your tag mirror is like your tag clouds, except that instead of seeing what you’ve tagged your books it shows what other members have tagged them. Sidelined because of speed problem, a series of database changes have made it viable again, without without extra caching. It’s not instant, but few users will find the speed insupportable.
Check it out:
And here’s the original blog post from back in 2007.
Labels: tag mirror, tagging
Tagmash. I’ve redone, improved and expanded my favorite feature, tagmashing.
Introduced back in 2007, tagmashes, allow you to investigate what books satisfy two or more tags. It’s a great way to find books of a clear type, but for which no single tag really works.
For example, no one has yet used the tag “vegetarian Indian cooking” and there’s no Library of Congress Subject Heading for it either. But combine three tags, like vegetarian, India and cooking into the tagmash vegetarian, India, cooking and you get over 50 good matches.
Simple two-tag combination can work wonders:
Some of my favorites are off-beat: all those books about knitting for your dog and—shiver—knitting with dog hair can be found at knitting, pets. erotic, zombies is 80% Laurell K. Hamilton. And who can say no to humor, pirates? (Did you know that this Saturday is Talk like a Pirate Day? You will.)
On the serious end, fairly complex topics also work:
You can also use – (minus) or — (double minus) to mean “demote” or “remove” a tag. For example:
An important feature of tagmash is that it’s not just a “search.” Once created, tagmash pages stay there, and it enters the “swirl of relatedness.” Somtimes a tag page will suggest the perfect tagmash. Other times, a tagmash will suggest an unconsidered subject.
New Feature: Tagmash overlap. I’ve added a new feature that, I think, brings tagmash to a new level—the tagmash overlap.
It works something like tag mirrors. Instead of showing you how you tag things, it shows how others tag your stuff. Except instead of showing you Individual tags, it finds tagmashes.
The results is, I think, a good list of topics you’re interested in—topics more complex than a single tag can express. In my case, it surfaces topics like Macedonia, history, Greek, divination, Ottoman Empire, travel and erotic, poetry (!). Abby is apparently interested in adventure, surreal, English, death, love and—what a winner—evil, love.
You can find the feature from your profile statistics page. If you’re signed in, this link will take you to yours.
What do you think? Comment here or come over to the New Features Talk thread.
Labels: classification, tag mirror, tagging, tagmash
Back when David Weinberger‘s Everything is Miscellaneous was published, LibraryThing ordered a box of copies to give out at conferences and so forth. (Although LibraryThing is mentioned only in passing, the book is, in a way, the intellectual justification for much of what we do.)
We ended up with a dozen or so left over, so I held a contest to get rid of them: Say something about what tagging means, or what it “does” to knowledge, and you might win a copy. I figured that it was time to stop pontificating about what people were doing with tags, and get them to pontificate instead.
The Talk topic eventually accumulated 170 comments, almost all interesting and some quite lengthy and involved. I found it thrilling stuff. We picked ten random winners, and sent out the books.
The whole discussion is newly relevant in light of our new Tag Mirror feature, discussed on the main blog and at in great detail on Talk.
Here are some selections from the full discussion:
I think the most interesting aspects of tagging, in a social networking context, are that: (1) All tagging is personal and (2) All tagging is public (ssd7)
So what does tagging do to knowledge? It classifies it in a fuzzy, family-resemblance kind of way, doing justice to multiple topics and interdisciplinary books in a way that the Dewey Decimal System could only do if it worked in four or five dimensions at once. (MyopicBookworm)
I like fun tags that are so personal or unique that nobody else uses them. A friend of mine, for example, has tags like “Detectives with gimmicks“, “Elaborate crimes“, “Witty people being clever“, and my favorite “Fangirlin’“. I myself want to use a tag for “Farm boys with magical destinies” but it’s apparently too long. (saturnine13)
Tags capture individual perceptions of a work, data, and add that information to our knowledge of the work. That’s a useful enhancement, but the variety offered becomes a disadvantage if they are used to find other works. Tags lack the precoordination necessary for efficient comprehensive searching. For example, the tagmash search for libraries, –fiction includes libraries and bibliotecas, but not bibliothéques, etc. Related works may have been lost. That interferes with one of Ranganathan’s laws—it does not save the time of the reader. (notelinks)
One of the things I find most fascinating about tagging is what it reveals about the cognitive processes of the taggers. What makes one person tag Walden with “simplicity” and another person with “hermits“? It’s not a novel observation that we all experience books (for example) personally or subjectively. Tagging is a very simple way to turn that individual experience into universal information. (johnascott)
I’m always amazed at the different ways of viewing something when I see how differently others tagged something to which I have already assigned the most ‘correct’ or ‘appropriate’ tags. (bobngail)
Believe it or not, tags are actually more formal or structured than some similar systems. Consider the general WikiWiki idea of turning any word into a link if it’s in FunnyCaps. The effect is very similar, but the links appear anywhere in text. Tags isolate the linking to specific fields. The extreme free-form nature of Wikis drives some people off, just as the extreme formalisms of MARC, etc. do. So tags seem to be a widely accepted compromise. (JasonRiedy)
Tagging doesn’t so much affect knowledge as reveal it in unexpected places and from unexpected sources. We are all bent, but we’re bent in different directions, and so the sum of our deviances converges on reality quickly – and tagging taps into that. (xaglen)
I think the main point to remember is that tagging is NOT JUST an unstructured form of subject headings; it is a completely different way of viewing the world. Taxonomies and standardised subject heading vocab divide knowledge hierarchically according to set rules. Folksonomies allow knowledge to emerge through collaborative involvement. Tagging allows people to look at books in new ways, to share that knowledge, and to create tag clouds so that no one tag gets missed. (mrsradcliffe)
Tagging helps to both aggregate and splinter knowledge. By this I mean, tagging helps to navigate relationships among disparate “knowledge objects” while at the same time, splits the categorization of similar objects into much finer and/or more random collections. (stoberg)
Everything is Miscellaneous is one of 37 books I currently have tagged “included in the present classification” (there are none that look like flies from a great distance). (sabreuse)
First, tags really only seem to work for organizing stuff you have some sort of conceptual “ownership” of things that in some way you have an incentive to keep order within. People don’t seem to want to tag in enough quantity / detail to be useful when they don’t have a personal stake in sorting through the resultant mess. (cubeshelves)
I much rather spend my time reading a book! (bcobb)
From a library standpoint, my favorite thing about tags is that it allows natural language into the catalog. .. [A]nd what tagging does to knowledge? It gives you more access points. (e1da)
Tagging is getting awfully close, it seems, to the way our brains naturally work anyway – it “associates” and “retrieves” based on miscellaneous tags it has (subconsciously) attached to the idea or concept. (nicknich3)
The variety of tagging systems is amazing. You can tell a lot about a user’s interests by the complexity of tags relating to a specific concept. I am always a bit disappointed when I encounter a catalog without
tags. Of course you can look at the books in that catalog, but you don’t get much indication of the user’s relationship to their books. (oregonobsessionz)
[SilentInAWay wrote an exceptional piece on the Deathly Hallows tag cloud and it’s common and uncommon tags, from fantasy (783) to Kleenex (1): — Ed]
[W]here there is a clear consensus on a tag, it is probably based on fairly broad considerations (and therefore constitutes relatively superficial knowledge). Conversely, the most intriguing tags (autistic-like character, Kleenex, the end of Pottermania) are almost inevitably used by only a single member. (SilentInAWay)
I remember being flabbergasted when I found out how long it took for the Library of Congress to change the subject heading “Vietnam Conflict” to “Vietnam War.” Now it doesn’t seem so ludicrous to me.
Even recognizing that LC Subject Headings and tagging achieve two different goals doesn’t ease my mind about this. I cannot stand the thought of how muddy and increasingly useless much of Library Thing’s tagging database will end up being in a very short time. (lmccoll)
Tagging permits me to see books as others see them. (kencf)
Labels: contests, everything is miscellaneous, tag mirror, tagging, weinberger
UPDATE: I’m really enjoying the Talk discussion of this feature. Also, at this point it’s better to talk about the feature than to use it. Everyone using it at once has the server that handles it taxed rather seriously!
A major publisher recently asked us to show them a tag cloud of their books. It took a mental flip, but only a few lines of code to adapt this for individual use.
The result is Tag Mirror, available from your and everyone’s profile—here’s mine (and Abby‘s, Altay‘s, Giovanni‘s and Casey‘s*). If you’re signed in, here’s yours. (Please note: It takes serious processing power to analyze 22 million tags. Everyone is going to hit it at once, so be patient.)
Tag Mirror “holds a mirror” up to your books and to you. Instead of showing what you think about your books—what a regular tag cloud shows—it shows you what others think of them, in effect using LibraryThing’s twenty-two million tags to organize and surface interesting topics from within your own collection.** As with other tag clouds, size equals importance. When you click on a tag, you get a relevancy-ranked list of books tagged that way.
I can’t decide if it’s just the sort of cherry-on-top feature that makes LibraryThing unique or if it’s something genuinely new and interesting. I think it might be the latter. As Altay put it, it’s the sort of idea that seems obvious in retrospect.
I didn’t know I was interested in gender studies.
Here’s a for-example. I don’t use the tags gender studies, patristics or theory. They’re just not terms I use. To some extent, that reflects who I am. But I have a fair number of books that, to others, fall under those categories. It’s interesting to slice my books up in an alien way—to see them through other eyes. Maybe I’m more interested in gender studies than I thought.
More concretely, I do use the tag “alternate history,” but browsing my tag mirror page called up some alternate histories that I hadn’t tagged that way—useful stuff.***
Finally, Tag Mirror gives everyone a tag cloud, even those who don’t bother to tag anything. It seems almost unfair.
As our recent discussion of what tagging does to knowledge brought out so well, tagging is a complex mixture of private purpose and public good. I agree with those who say that we tag best when we tag for ourselves. But when everyone does that, a rich web of meaning is created.
I’ve done my best to push tagging in some new directions, trying subjects and tags together statistically, making book recommendations based on tag patterns, and with the tagmash feature. You can add Tag Mirror to that list. Little things. But they keep getting more interesting.
UPDATE: It’s 4:30am and, of course, I couldn’t finish blogging it before someone else started a thread about it (“Just noticed this on my profile”). Come talk about it.
*Casey has a surprising number of cookbooks! He’s coming up here in a few weeks—it’ll be the first time any of us have actually met him. We usually just order pizza. I think that plan’s changed.
**It doesn’t actually exclude your own tags. They still have an effect.
***It also brought up Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. People tag unexpectedly, if humorously.
Labels: folksonomy, tag mirror, tagging, tagmash
