On Flickr, a Web-based service for managing and sharing digital images, reading and tagging come together in ways that reveal how people -- as individuals organizing their own photographs as well as making them available for discovery by others -- think about reading when they attempt to depict it in images and in words. In this pilot study of the tags assigned to a sample of 100 photographs tagged with the terms book and reading, only 80 of the 561 total tags were used more than once. The broad range of unique tags suggests an idiosyncratic approach to labeling that makes it difficult to draw conclusions about images of reading. Consequently, additional searches were conducted on Flickr and the results are reported and interpreted. The paper concludes with a discussion of proposed follow-up research

Malone, Cheryl Knott

English

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The Social (Tagging) Act of Reading

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The Social (Tagging) Act of ReadingCheryl Knott MaloneUA SIRLS1515 East First StreetTucson, AZ 857191-520-621-3565ckmalone@u.arizona.eduABSTRACTOn Flickr, a Web-based service for managing and sharing digital images, reading and tagging come together in ways that reveal how people -- as individuals organizing their own photographs as well as making them available for discovery by others --  think about  reading when they attempt  to depict  it  in  images and in words. In this pilot study of the tags assigned to a sample of 100 photographs tagged with the terms book and reading, only 80 of the 561 total tags were used more than once. The broad range of unique tags  suggests  an idiosyncratic approach to labeling that makes it difficult to draw conclusions about images of reading. Consequently, additional searches were conducted on Flickr and the results are reported and interpreted. The paper concludes with a discussion of proposed follow-up research.TopicsCultural information systemsInformation organizationKeywordsreading, books, social tagging, Flickr, photographs1. INTRODUCTIONMitchell Stephens in The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word  describes  three places  --  a  physician's  waiting  room,  a  child's bedroom,  and a passenger jet -- and asks "What's missing from these  pictures?"  His  answer:  "Reading  is  now  missing  from countless  scenes  it once dominated:  at  kitchen tables,  on buses and  trains,  in  beds  at  night,  on  couches,  even  in  some classrooms."  ,  p.  8]  Reading  of  literature  in  particular  is  less  present  in American lives, according to a National Endowment for the Arts survey,  which  in  2004  identified  "an  overall  decline  of  10 percentage  points  in  literary  readers  from  1982  to  2002, representing  a  loss  of  20 million  potential  readers."  [6]  At  the same time, scholars of print culture have produced quantities of studies of  reading,  both  current  and  historical.  The  work  on  current reading practices often uses ethnographic methods to observe and interview  readers  while  the  historical  studies  draw  on  the customary sources of historians, archival and published texts, to reconstruct readers and their experiences.  Their work documents the political, social, individual, and cultural functions, uses, and meanings of reading in diverse circumstances and locales.Reading  would at first glance seem to have nothing to do with collaborative  or  distributed  tagging  of  information  resources, especially images. Both are of interest to researchers and teachers of library and information science (LIS),  albeit to different and probably not overlapping communities of interest, despite the fact that  neither  reading  nor  tagging  is  considered  core  to  LIS paradigms or to the LIS curriculum [4], [9]. Print culture theorists understand reading as both a solitary and a social act. Similarly, social  tagging  of information  resources has  both individual and social  aspects.  One  place  where  reading  and  tagging  come together is Flickr, a Web-based service for managing and sharing digital images. Images tagged "reading" constitute a new body of documentation  for  print  culture  scholars,  who  typically  have relied on the word to study the word, but they also offer a body of data  for  LIS  researchers  interested  in  understanding  the phenomenon  of  collaborative  indexing  and  what  it  can  tell  us about amateur or what Beghtol [1] has called "naïve" information resource description and organization. Corinne Jorgensen [4] has pointed out that there are now three ways to provide intellectual access  to images:  human-assigned  controlled vocabulary terms, computer-generated  indexing,  and  social  (or  distributed  or collaborative) tagging. She suggests that social tagging may help reduce  the  "semantic  gap"  between  human  indexing  with  its interest  in  contextual  meaning  and  automated  indexing  with its focus on describing the content and characteristics of the object represented in an image.On Flickr, reading and tagging come together in ways that reveal how people -- as individuals organizing their own photographs as well as  making  them available for  discovery by others --  think about  reading  when they attempt  to depict  it  in  images  and  in words.  How  people  conceptualize  and  represent  reading  in  the early 21st century matters to students of print culture interested in the continuing  and changing  activities and behaviors  associated with  literacy  and  to  students  of  information  interested  in  the continuing and changing activities and behaviors associated with resource description for organization and retrieval. Consequently, this paper marks the beginning of a research project designed to uncover  and  analyze  modern-day  graphic  and  textual representations of reading in everyday life. The preliminary work reported  here  focuses  on  identifying  what  is  depicted  images labeled with the tags books and reading. This work will serve as a foundation  for  further  research  into  the  relationship  between reading  and  tagging  as  social  acts  but  also  as  an  intellectual interaction characteristic of life in the Information Age.  2. METHODSApproximately  55  million  photographs  are  on  Flickr.  [3]  The number  fluctuates  as  new photos  are uploaded  and  as  existing ones are removed.  A simple keyword search  of  the full text of Flickr for reading yields more than 700,000 results (after deleting those where the keywords pennsylvania, penn, and pa also occur in an attempt to eliminate photographs  of  the city of Reading).  When  the  search  is  limited  to  tags  only,  the  result  is  almost 109,000. This pilot study used two methods to reduce the number of  results  for  the  purposes  of  this  report.  The  search  query included  the  words  reading and  book limited  to  tags  only, bringing the total results to 11,213.  A random sample of 100 of these  results  was  selected  for  the  study.  The  100  photographs depicted  a  range  of  compositions  including  individuals  and groups  handling  books,  still-life  compositions  involving  books with other objects such as coffee mugs and eyeglasses, shots of individual  books  both  open  and  closed,  and  stacks  or  piles  or shelves of books. The researcher viewed each of the 100 images and their tags and recorded and tabulated the tags. To  address  Mitchell  Stephens's  assertion  about  where  reading occurs, additional searches were conducted using keywords such as  train,  bus, and  airplane combined with  book  and limited to tags only.  The point is not to prove that books still have a place in the Information Age as evidenced by their robust representation on a photo-sharing site, but to explore what constitutes "reading" to  the  collective  mind  of  Flickr  image  taggers  and  to  elicit questions for further investigation.3. FINDINGS AND ANALYSISAlthough this study is limited to images tagged with both reading and  book, many other keywords related to the topic are assigned as tags on Flickr. Table 1 lists some of them and the number of records with those tags (as of 01/24/08), ranked by most to least common.  The singular  form  book  is  the most  commonly  used tag, but it is not clear that every image tagged with the term is using that keyword to mean the printed codex.  What is clear is that some photographs tagged with the term book do not depict a book at all but merely evoke the idea of a book, such as the image of a  young man looking down [2] or of a solitary bookmark [5].  Not surprisingly, more specific tags, such as novel and hardcover are used less frequently than broader tags.  Table 1. Reading-related keywords as Flickr tagsKeyword OccurrencesBook 199,416Books 137,162Reading 108,553Read 13,755Novel 5,842Reader 3,806Paperback 2,999Novels 1,713Readers 1,597Hardcover 814Mybook 747Reads 654Mybooks 644Hardback 479Softcover 406Chapbook 233Chapbooks 22Although the 100 photos included in this study are not necessarily tagged with the keywords shown in Table 1, they nevertheless are useful  because  they were tagged with two of  the most  popular ones: book and reading. The number of unique tags beyond book and  reading assigned to these 100 photographs  totaled 559.  Of the 561 total tags assigned to the 100 photographs, only 80 were used more than once, as shown in Table 2. The terms have not been grouped into categories, but some ways to  do  that  are  obvious.  For  example,  it  would  make  sense  to combine the terms me, self, and self-portrait (which is a already a combination of self-portrait and selfportrait) into a single group Table 2. Additional tags for photos tagged book and readingTag OccurrencesRead 9Books 7Me 7self-portrait 6Coffee 5Girl 5Library 5People 5Art 4Café 4Christmas 4Glasses 4portrait 4Woman 42005 3American tour 3Author 3baby 3beautiful 3Bed 3Blue 3bookstore 3Bouchercon 2007 3Country 3crime writer 3France 3Glacier 3Home 3literature 3Michael Jecks 3novelist 3Paris 3Red 3San Francisco 3School 3Signing 3View 3Writing 3365 days 2365days 2Architecture 2Beach 2Black 2Bookmark 2Bw 2bwPingu 2California 2Cat 2Days 2Display 2Dog 2Doll 2Eslite 2Eslitebooks 2Explore 2Family 2Felt 2Holiday 2Illustration 2India 2lady 2Lesson 2Librarian 2Libro 2Livro 2Man 2Mom 2Nikon 2Peets 2Reader 2Self 2Shoes 2Sitting 2Statue 2Story 2Street 2Student 2Studying 2Sunset 2Taipei 2totaling 15 occurrences in the 561 tags used in the 100 photos. But  the  tag  me,  tied  for  second  place  with  7  occurrences,  is interesting in and of itself.   It’s commonplace for library and information science (LIS) practitioners and researchers to assert that tags are akin to subject headings and indexing terms, but the tag me arose out of social tagging and not out of formal, expert controlled-vocabulary construction. For those of us with an LIS background, the tag me seems superfluous at best and downright nonsensical given its ambiguity and its seeming lack of utility for information retrieval. And, yet, it has its uses, however unexpected.  One Flickr user has written: “The ‘me’ tag is easily my favourite tag on Flickr, it shows the wide variety of different folks who post to Flickr, a wide variety of ages and genders, appearances and attitudes.” [8] Tagging a photo me may serve as the photographer’s way to take credit for their work without having to reveal their real name or other personal information.Table 2 does not indicate what’s most striking about the ways in which images related to reading are tagged because it does not list the 479 tags assigned to only one of the 100 photos in the sample set.  These unique tags range alphabetically from A train to zig. Many of them are the first names of the individuals captured in the photographs. Others are the titles and authors of the books depicted.  As with the tags in Table 2, such as library and studying, some of these single-use terms seem highly correlated to the reading of books.  For example, the terms include literary  festival and author event.  Other terms, such as the active sailing and the passive sleeping, seem incompatible with the act of reading. The tags for the sample of 100 images do not quite address Mitchell Stephens’s assertion that it is rare to find people reading in public or private spaces. The sample set is small relative to the total number of images on Flickr. And people do not tag in a systematic manner requiring them to make sure every object shown in a photograph has a corresponding tag. But a search in all of Flickr combining the tag book with other tags representing a variety of settings did turn up some results worth considering, as seen in Table 3. Beach emerged as the most frequent setting of the setting-related tags searched. It may be that people take books to the beach in greater numbers than to Starbucks. Perhaps they take newspapers to Starbucks instead. It could also be that people take books and digital cameras on the relatively rare and relaxed days when they visit the beach more often than they take both to Starbucks when they stop in on their way to work. In other words, each row in the table can only suggest some of the contexts in which books can be found. The table as a whole, however, provides us with a sense that some books coincide with some people’s eating, drinking, loafing, and traveling. And with their shooting and sharing of photographs. Table 3. Photos with book tag and a contextual tagTags Occurrencesbeach 1,436table 1,096coffee 992bed 929park 788train 594 kitchen 502café 495lunch 494hotel 452couch 439bedroom 357office 338Starbucks 201dinner 200bus 176pool 173breakfast 170metro 160subway 159airplane 158waiting 117coffeeshop 664. FURTHER RESEARCHThis preliminary study cannot offer definitive conclusions, but it can  serve  as  the  foundation  for  further  research,  especially because it can suggest additional questions to ask and methods to use.Here are some research questions that have occurred to me and that I plan to pursue as a result of this early work.• What demographics are represented in photos depicting people and books? What proportion show different age groups, genders, ethnicities, and nationalities? What are the methodological issues involved in trying to interpret demographics  from  images  when  the  accompanying tags do not provide any demographic indications?• Which  books  are  shown  in  photographs  tagged  with terms related to books and reading? Which authors are represented,  which  specific  book  titles,  and  which categories of books are shown and in what proportion? What impact does a media event such as the release of a Harry  Potter  book  have  on  the  number  and  type  of photos published?• How  do  the  titles  and  captions  and  comments supplement  or  subvert  the  tags  assigned  to  photos? How does the photostream and/or themed set in which the photo  appears  alter the viewer’s  understanding  of the photo? • To  what  extent  are  photos  of  reading  staged  versus candid? To what extent is the book a prop? What is the function of the book as prop—for creating a particular self-image  or  for  product  (or  author  or  bookstore  or library) promotion or to evoke the centuries-old symbol of literacy or revolution or erudition? The  last  set  of  questions  will  require  surveying  and/or interviewing  photographers.   The  remaining  questions  can  be answered  largely  through  the  use  of  good  data  gathering  and analytic methods.Flickr is a popular and successful social networking site and its features  serve its  users  well.  But  the researcher  needs  different kinds of features and functions. The large number of unique tags assigned to photos, the lack of a highly developed search engine with  full  Boolean  operations  and  truncation  devices,  and  the absence of a controlled vocabulary of indexing terms hamper the researcher’s ability to retrieve a reliable and accurate set of results depicting reading.  Consequently, the data-gathering and analysis methods  used  in  subsequent  work on  this  topic  should  include researcher-generated indexing terms for each image being studied. This  approach  would  introduce  much-needed  consistency;  for example, a photo of someone reading in the aisles at Borders and another of a reader sitting in a chair at Barnes & Noble would both  be  assigned  a  controlled-vocabulary  term  such  as “bookstore.” This approach would also allow not only for greater consistency  but  also  for  comprehensiveness,  at  least  for  the researcher’s interests. For instance, a photo of a person sitting on the grass in a city park would probably never be tagged “public” but  the  researcher  interested  in  making  a  distinction  between reading  in public  and  reading  in private would find  such  a tag useful. Finally, the researcher’s work should be grounded not only in the literature of social tagging but in the theory of the social uses of photography and in work on the intersection of print and digital culture.5. CONCLUSIONThe  practices  of  sharing  digital  images  and  providing collaborative  tagging  to  describe  images  have  created  an intriguing body of work that can be mined for information related to  many  topics,  not  least  of  which  is  the  topic  of  books  and reading in the era of digital information.  But neither images nor their labels offer unambiguous evidence for the persistence of the printed codex, its relative presence in people’s lives, or the uses to which it is put. A preliminary look at a selection of digital photos tagged  book  and  reading  suggests  that,  with  carefully  crafted research methods, both image and word can be studied together to help  us  understand  individual  and  social  uses  of  reading,  or perhaps  more  accurately,  individual  and  social  uses  of representations of reading.    6. REFERENCES[1] Beghtol,  C.  2003.  Classification  for  information retrieval  and  classification  for  knowledge  discovery: Relationships  between  "professional"  and  "naïve" classifications. Knowl. Organ. 30, 64-73. [2] Finraz.  2007.  DSC_8547.jpg.  DOI= http://www.Flickr.com/photos/finraz/1815754754[3] Flickr.  Creative  Commons. DOI=(http://www.Flickr.com/creativecommons/)[4] Jörgensen,  C.  2007.  Image  access,  the  semantic  gap, and social tagging as a paradigm shift. In Lussky, Joan, Ed.,  Proceedings  18th  Workshop  of  the  American Society  for  Information  Science  and  Technology Special  Interest  Group  in  Classification  Research, Milwaukee, WI. DOI=http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/2064/. [5] MoonlitBeadery.  2008.  Cobalt  &  Cranberry  Baking Bookmark. DOI=http://www.flickr.com/photos/moonlitbeadery/2209086765/.[6] National Endowment for the Arts. 8 July 2004. Literary reading  in  dramatic  decline,  according  to  National Endowment  for  the  Arts  Survey. DOI=http://www.nea.gov/news/news04/ReadingAtRisk.html.[7] Stephens, M. (1998). The Rise of the Image, the Fall of  the Word. Oxford University Press.[8] striatic. 2004. Tagography ~ case studies. FlickrCentral/Discuss. DOI= http://www.Flickr.com/groups/central/discuss/2730/ .[9] Wiegand, W.A. 1997. Out of sight, out of mind: Why don't we have any schools of library and reading studies? J. Educ. Libr. Inf. Sci. 38, 314-326.

The Social (Tagging) Act of Reading

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