Signal and noise: social construction and representation

This paper attempts to draw a quick sketch of some of the work that relates to the state of social tagging research today. The result is intended to be representative rather than exhaustive. The goal of indexing consistency is discussed and examined with respect to the specificities of differing indexing systems. The relation of indexing consistency with 'language-in-use' is discussed. We then proceed to take a look at a few examples of much older systems that relate closely with the lessons now being learned in social tagging today, in order to situate the present activity in its historical context – and examine a few approaches used for text-based search-and-retrieval and their relevance to tag corpora. To conclude, some distinctions between personal, social and global information management are discussed.