deuxlits

for the past year i’ve been working on an ethnography of social classification project. this has been mainly a pilot study of what it is that people actually do when they are adding things into sites like del.icio.us, flickr, etc. there’s been some early research (thx gleemie!) so far that begins to really incorporate ideas of social connection and social relations in digital social classification, rather than simply assuming that it happens like magic. as i’ve been plowing through my data, i’ve starting thinking about the ways in which these systems represent acts of collecting, rather than classifying. after looking around it seems like the tags that people really use are pretty arbitrary. there’s been so much focus and analysis on the tags themselves, that the research so far has been pretty limited at getting at what it is that people are actually doing. collecting seems to be a good way to think about this…at least that’s what i’m thinking so far.

as i’ve been chewing on this idea, i’s got thinking. there’s something about collecting that gives us a sense of who we are. there’s something about amassing things over time and then looking back on them that allows us to understand our historical trajectory. there’s something about collecting that gives us some kind of home in time, that allows us to place ourselves in the stretch of years past. how can i begin to think about acts of collecting in relation to space and time? it seems that people collect and it can either operate as a window into some unknown other , like with curio cabinets. but in collection personal artefacts, there’s something about memorializing ourselves, and imbuing objects with this kind of role of memorialization. think photos. think yearbooks. think that rock you picked up on the coast during the summer trip to rosarito. perhaps memorialization isn’t the right word as it makes it seem too much stuffy and official, but there’s definitely something in the act of collecting that  is about ordering in time and constructing space, some kind of domestic space. some kind of personal space. but also some kind of shared space too.

so a lot of these little things that we toss into our digital filing cabinet, these so-called tagging systems, they’re like digital scraps. digital news clippings. digital ephemera of sorts. i think researchers have made a mistake so far by looking at the terms of organization, the tags.  i think the real story is about how people relate to their digital scraps. i think there is a really kind of under the radar, seemingly quiet-boring tension here that we haven’t really explored yet.