I am cur­rently orga­niz­ing my lit­er­a­ture on tag­ging. When I started with research on that topic about a year ago, you could count the num­ber of sub­stan­tial con­tri­bu­tions on one hand. Over the cur­rent year, how­ever, the num­ber of papers on this topic has sky-rocketed, which makes the whole area hard to over­see at the moment.

I will start with an overview of my sub­jec­tive must-reads for now (all linked to citeulike):

Posi­tion Paper, Tag­ging, Tax­on­omy, Flickr, Arti­cle, ToRead Mar­low C, Naa­man M, Boyd D, Davis M Pro­duced for the WWW06 work­shop, this paper was an essen­tial con­tri­bu­tion to char­ac­ter­iz­ing dif­fer­ent tag­ging sys­tems and the result­ing tag­ging dynamics.

The Struc­ture of Col­lab­o­ra­tive Tag­ging Sys­tems Golder S, Huber­man BA A sem­i­nal ref­er­ence paper intro­duc­ing tag­ging in the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity. The most notable con­tri­bu­tion are the insights the authors pro­vide into the emer­gence of sta­ble pat­terns in tag pro­por­tions over time.

Folk­sonomies: Tidy­ing up Tags? Guy M, Tonkin E A dis­cus­sion of prin­ci­ple short­com­ings of tag­ging and pos­si­ble resolutions.

The vocab­u­lary prob­lem in human-system com­mu­ni­ca­tion Fur­nas GW, Lan­dauer TK, Gomez LM, Dumais ST Although not directly applic­a­ble to tag­ging, this paper from the late 80s is the base­line for exper­i­ments with free-form nam­ing and anno­ta­tion in the dig­i­tal realm.

Magic Words: How Lan­guage Aug­ments Human Com­pu­ta­tion Clark A A great dis­cus­sion of words as cog­ni­tive tools from a cog­ni­tive sci­ence and phi­los­o­phy perspective.

Col­lab­o­ra­tive Tag­ging and Semi­otic Dynam­ics Cat­tuto C, Loreto V, Pietronero L An inspir­ing dis­cus­sion of the tem­po­ral dynam­ics of tag­ging sys­tems. The core con­tri­bu­tion is a very sim­ple prob­a­bilis­tic model based on Yule-Simon mem­ory model. Although many ques­tions remain open, this model has some direct con­se­quences on deal­ing with tags in user inter­faces, which I will elab­o­rate on in a later post.