[iDC] Strategic usage of folksonomies: a case study

[Simon Biggs]

Hi Eugenio

My understanding of language, even culture, is that like a Turing machine it
is endlessly recombining itself into new patterns. In this sense the term
encoding is particular. I would suggest the reason there is a resemblance
between a Turing machine and language is that computing is linguistic ­ it
is a way of making language and, like language, it tends to have a life of
its own. That is the argument I put forward in the paper I refered you to
(referencing Winograd).

Coming from a background influenced by semiotics I find the concept of
Construction Grammar, at first sight, both alien and intriguing. However,
semiotics concerns itself with the unit of meaning, which might be a word
but could also be a larger composite structure, such as a sequence of words
within a grammatic structure. In that sense there might be no fundamental
conflict between the approaches. Construction Grammar might even offer a
bridge between those with a semiotic approach and those employing a formal
grammar approach (Chomskian).

A central premise of pluriliteracy is that people are becoming polyglot not
just with spoken/written languages but also other linguistic forms, such as
those associated with a mediated world and that for each individual the
function of each language they employ can have very different value. So one
language might be the one through which they socially interact, another
through which they exchange goods and yet another the means by which they
navigate power and governance. Garcia does not argue that these value
relations are necessarily heirarchic (although they might be) and he points
out that such value is motile. We see this evidenced on the streets of our
big cities and in the geo-political collisions that typify our age. In this
respect pluriliteracy is a useful concept for approaching the more general
idea of globalisation and can even be seen as linked to some aspects of
post-modern relativism (eg: Foucault¹s argument that power, and its
use/abuse, is exercised by us all ­ established as primarily a linguistic
activity).

Regards

Simon

On 9/1/09 21:19, "Eugenio Tisselli" <cubo23 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hi Simon,
> 
> Thank you for sharing your essay "Transculturation, transliteracy and
> generative poetics", it's truly inspiring. I am not very well-versed in
> discourses such as transculturation or pluriliteracy; however my research on
> folksonomies and the emergence of shared lexicons could be related to some
> ideas in your text. You wrote:
> 
> "Meaning, and the value that derives from it, has been encoded in diverse
> forms and media for millennia."
> 
> I like your use of the term "encoding", since I believe that meaning is not
> hard-coded into these forms and media, but it's actually being re-coded
> continuously through social interaction. Indeed, objects are carriers of
> meaning, but it may be quite different for people who nevertheless share them.
> 
> In language, the separation of form and meaning is represented by the
> relatively recent Construction Grammar, a linguistic theory in which a
> grammatical construction is always a pairing of form and content
> (http://www.constructiongrammar.org). More recently, Fluid Construction
> Grammar has acknowledged the emergent and constantly-changing nature of these
> pairings (http://emergent-languages.org/). These theoretical frameworks are
> quite useful when studying folksonomies and emergent semantics on the World
> Wide Web... 
> 
> Surely, a folksonomy is a linguistic model that reflects the degree to which
> the users who generated it (through their individual naming actions) share a
> common lexicon. But the meaning(s) of each tag will probably vary greatly for
> each individual. I'm not sure how this could relate to the concepts of
> pluriliteracy and transliteracy, but certainly we face a dynamic situation in
> which the users of a folksonomy must necessarily acknowledge and manage the
> multiple, co-generated meanings of the same tag. This is the case of search
> engines, especially tag-based ones: users must interpret and go through
> results that may be wildly diverse, yet all of them "accurate". Moreover,
> these results will change over time, depending greatly on the users' online
> naming acts.
> 
> Best,
> Eugenio.


Simon Biggs
Research Professor
edinburgh college of art
s.biggs at eca.ac.uk
www.eca.ac.uk
www.eca.ac.uk/circle/

simon at littlepig.org.uk
www.littlepig.org.uk
AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk


Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201


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