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Emerging Scholars lecture -- Semantic Carnival: Tagging and the New Descriptive Acts of the Next Generation Web

The doctoral students of the Information School present a research talk by one of our recent alumni, Joe Tennis, now at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Joe will speak about the relationship between social tagging and other forms of metadata. A reception will precede the talk at 5:00 p.m. The talk will begin at 5:30.

Semantic Carnival: Tagging and the New Descriptive Acts of the Next Generation Web

Abstract: I will introduce my understanding of the social tagging phenomenon, used in systems such as Flickr, del.icio.us, and LibraryThing, and then talk about how these relate to other descriptive acts, including indexing and ontology engineering. I will present a framing metaphor to distinguish social tagging from other conceptions: the semantic carnival, a way of thinking about Web description that focuses on the experience, spectacle, and affect of description, rather than other values present in indexing and ontology engineering.

Bio
Joseph T. Tennis is an Assistant Professor at the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies of the University of British Columbia, Canada. Tennis received his M.L.S. and Specialist degree in Library and Information Science in Book History from the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University. He received his Ph.D. from
the University of Washington.

He is a member of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) Usage Board and the Editorial Board for the journal Knowledge Organization, and he serves as Classification and Knowledge Organization Section Editor of dLIST. His research interests include classification theory, interaction with and management of classificatory structures, and comparative functional analysis of metadata.