Folksonomy
My latest Anthropology News article is now online. It is a general introduction to “folksonomy.” I explain the concept by comparing folksonomies to traditional classification systems, such as the Dewy decimal system and the original Yahoo search directory. I also provide examples of how folksonomy web sites can be used by anthropologists. (See my Flickrology post for one such case study.)
Although the term folksonomy owes its roots to the anthropological study of “folk taxonomies,” popular in the 1960s, it is a new term, coined by blogger Thomas Vander Wal to describe an emergent, decentralized approach to classifying information on the Internet. As opposed to previous systems, which required each piece of information to be classified by a professional archivist, as in the Dewey decimal system used by libraries, a folksonomy asks each user to classify information as they see fit, sharing the resulting classifications between users. This works with electronic documents because, unlike a book on a library shelf, each item can be filed in more than one place. Imagine a virtual library where everyone shelved books as they do in their own home. While some people’s shelving skills may be sorely lacking, the chances are that at least one other person would have filed Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific in exactly the same place you would expect to find it—under “ethnography.” If there are an infinite number of virtual copies it doesn’t matter that someone else mistakenly filed it under “astronaut.”
UPDATE: Unfortunately, it seems this did not make it to the May issue. They will be publishing it in the Fall. I will update this again when it hits the streets.
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Comments
s got great takes on the uses of these texts — a real insider’s view — and many examples. Others are supplying their own creative examples in the comments. It strikes me that a folksonomy (and here ) of legal boilerpate can’t be far off.
Hey could you add a full citation to the treeware version of this and your other articles? I think it would be helpful if people wanted to cite it.
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An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
would guarantee that the attending students would use the ) of my own and find others to borrow from. Kerim Friedman of Keywords has an entry in which he links to his article about “folksonomy” in the latest Anthropology News. It looks exactly like something which will be useful should I