Another journal

We’re just going to start mid-thought, here.

And the THING is, at one point I was letting the tags just happen when I posted to Tumblr from Flickr and the use of tagging is very different in those two contexts.

In Flickr (for the most part that I encounter!) you’re tagging the content of the image (example: baking, cupcakes, frosting, white chocolate) and the methods used to create the image (the types of cameras or lenses, most often). So folks who want to look at a lot of pictures of [thing] or whatever can find them.

Tumblr, overall-ish (or at least the bits I see), you are more likely (when not using tags to have conversations or footnote or whatever) is about the subject of the post (example: #vent, #/negative, #vampires, #dracula daily).

Subject versus content is a very permeable membrane–for some folks they’re using tags to also log how something is created (example: #procreate), or to make it easier to find images or stories that contain a specific thing (example: #fangs) or so that people can filter them out (example: #blood). Then, of course, there’s the negative tagging system where tags are used to call out the non-theme posts (example: #not naruto).

Like any user-managed tagging system it really does come down to the user’s intent. And that’s great because it’s surprisingly easy to adjust to different people’s styles of tagging within their blog, even if it is different from how the larger sub-system they’re in tags. You’ll note I’ve been putting a lot of (but not EVERYONE) kinds of things in parentheses because if I’ve learned one thing over the years it’s that non-moderated tagging and categorisation can create the most beautiful variants of logic I’ve ever seen, the kind of creatures that could not survive beyond their hyper-specific islands of user and their posts (which makes AO3 tag wranglers a kind of zoologist, maybe, performing vital functions).

The point of this is that I was not maintaining, for myself, an internal consistency in the tagging. We’re not trying to be perfect here, just attempting to normalise some sort of reasonable, repeatable consistency.

Much of what I’m doing is normalising the control vocabulary. What is “control vocabulary”? A term I learned when my partner got their MLIS that I then imprinted on like a baby bird. The short of it is: a selected (controlled) list of words or phrases (vocabulary). By selecting from the preset list, you make it easier to find what you’re looking for. Only one post tagged with the word “#equipment”? Well that can be corrected for the tag “#tools,” better grouping like items.

The bulk of the rest of the work I was doing in cleaning tags was removing extraneous tags that mean and do nothing in the greater intent of “grouping like with like.” There’s only one post tagged “#teens” and it’s a gift set of Picnic at Hanging Rock. Goodbye forever, tag. It takes use consideration sometimes. “#Velvet” seems like a logical tag, one that would be paired with “#textiles” or any similar types of fibre arts tag, but in the context of a photo with a velvet background? Nope, not for this blog.

Other seemingly deletable tags (example: #msn) were actually just me talking in tags, either single word in a tag for emphasis or answering a poll (about my first social media, in this case). After the last tag cleanup work I began to make sure I answer polls in tags with multi-word responses to make the differences more clear for any future maintenance efforts.

The way I’m even picking out individual label-type tags to check from the hundreds I’m cleaning is by having a little program running in my head that tries to guess what a tag might contain. I’m out here tagging posts on the regular, so if I see “#finals” I can go “hmm, either this is something to be deleted or it contains tips for folks doing finals in school.” Then, I check it out and if it’s the former it is delete time and if it’s the later I probably also add “#resources” or “#tips and tricks” and move on. A tag like “#metal” on my blog needs to be checked to see if I mean the thing people make sculptures from or the music genre–and if it is used as the music genre then it needs to be clarified to “heavy metal.”

And here’s the thing, I’m going to get it wrong. I’m going to skim over a tag like “#meat” because I do have a few sub-tags for recipes or cooking, or animal husbandry. And I won’t realise it’s a tag used ONLY on some random fan art of some character from a book. That’s okay, I know that a categorisation system is a living thing that grows and changes and I will come back and prune and tidy again–which is really also important because not only will I catch stuff I have missed, but I’ll see new groupings that have grown and deserve a new term in the control vocabulary.

Sometimes a tag is useless to the subjects I currently reblog, or is about topics I no longer care about, but the relevant tags can stay, though I did make sure they were brought to heel with the modern control vocabulary (pluralising, correcting caps or tense, etc.). The tags that you look at and see no posts more recent than 2014 are valuable for their absence, tracking the rise and fall of interests.

What’s maddening is that some of these tags seem baked into posts in a non-removable way, particularly on some old Flickr/Tumblr cross posts. No matter what I do, there are tags like “twins” that will never be extricated from posts like this one, for whatever hell coding reason.

There’s no point to this, I just wanted to document my thoughts as I went (and a lot of this was written while I was finishing up the last of the project). I ALSO want to share some of the cool stats I uncovered while doing this project but that’ll be another post.