[Air-L] Folksonomy: free public lecture by Thomas Vander Wal, 2pm, 18 September 2007, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

[Bruce Mason]

A lecture that may be of interest to some of our UK-based members.
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Folksonomy: A look at a hated word but a loved resource

2:00-3:30PM, September 18, 2007. Free and open to the public.

Room 0.01, Clephan Building, De Montfort University, Leicester UK. LE1 9BH



"Folksonomy" was recently voted one of the new terms most likely to make you
"wince, shudder or want to bang your head on the keyboard." This talk by
the inventor of the term – Thomas Vander Wal –  will offer you a chance to
make your own judgment. The talk is open to all and will not require any
specialist knowledge on behalf of the audience.



A Folksonomy can be created when users of "web2.0" sites such as YouTube,
Flickr, LastFM and Del.icio.us add keywords ("tags") to the items they view
in order to add information about these items. As more and more users tags
such items more information is created about the the items. Unlike library
catalogues which are created by experts, folksonomies are like catalogues
created by everyday people. For some, this heralds a brave new era of
democratic information management, for others it heralds the death of
expertise.



Thomas Vander Wal lives in Bethesda, Maryland, and this is a rare
opportunity to hear him in the UK. He coined the term "folksonomy" in 2004
and is a popular speaker on tagging/folksonomy, social web, and web
applications around well structured information. He is principal, and senior
consultant at InfoCloud Solutions, a social web consulting firm. Thomas has
been working professionally on the web since 1995 (with a professional IT
background beginning in 1988) and has breadth and depth across many roles
and disciplines around web design, social web development & research and
general web development. He is a member of the Web Standards Project
Steering Committee and helped found the Information Architecture Institute
and Boxes & Arrows web magazine. See his web site to find out more:
http://www.vanderwal.net/<https://webmail.dmu.ac.uk/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.vanderwal.net/>



The lecture is presented as part of the AHRC-funded research project Tags
Networks Narratives, examining the interdisciplinary application of
experimental social software to the study of narrative in digital contexts.
It is a unique speculative project assessing the potential for collaborative
social-software techniques such as folksonomy in narrative research. The
project explores:



    * What kinds of collaborative social network tools are available for the
gathering and classification of information?

    * Which researchers are making online narratives the focus of study, and
how are those projects categorised by discipline?

    * How can these researchers make effective use of social network tools
to share knowledge and develop interdisciplinary collaborations?



The project is based in the Institute of Creative Technologies (IOCT) at De
Montfort University, Leicester UK and is funded by the Arts and Humanities
Research Board from October 2006-September 2007. The project team consists
of Professor Sue Thomas, Bruce Mason and Simon Mills.



The talk is organised in partnership with Production and Research in
Transliteracy group
http://www.transliteracy.com<https://webmail.dmu.ac.uk/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.transliteracy.com>


For more information and directions to the venue visit
http://www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/tnn/vanderwal07.htm<https://webmail.dmu.ac.uk/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk/tnn/vanderwal07.htm>