Member activities and quality of tags in a collection of historical photographs in Flickr

Abstract

To enable and guide effective metadata creation it is essential to understand the structure and patterns of the activities of the community around the photographs, resources used, and scale and quality of the socially created metadata relative to the metadata and knowledge already encoded in existing knowledge organization systems. This article presents an analysis of Flickr member discussions around the photographs of the Library of Congress photostream in Flickr. The article also reports on an analysis of the intrinsic and relational quality of the photostream tags relative to two knowledge organization systems: the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials (TGM) and the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). Thirty seven percent of the original tag set and 15.3% of the preprocessed set (after the removal of tags with fewer than three characters and URLs) were invalid or misspelled terms. Nouns, named entity terms, and complex terms constituted approximately 77% of the preprocessed set. More than a half of the photostream tags were not found in the TGM and LCSH, and more than a quarter of those terms were regular nouns and noun phrases. This suggests that these terms could be complimentary to more traditional methods of indexing using controlled vocabularies.

Tag-based social image retrieval: An empirical evaluation

“…Using data from Delicious, 2 Golder and Huberman (2006) identified seven functions that tags perform, including identifying what or who it is about, what it is, who owns it, refine categories, and self-reference. These functions are largely applicable to Flickr as well (Stvilia & Jörgensen, 2010). Zollers (2007) links the seven functions with possible tagging motivations extrapolated from work by Marlow et al (2006).…”

Interacting with and through a digital library collection

“…These categories appear promising as sources of user-supplied metadata, perhaps first subject to quality control from curators [4] [7]. Posts asserting Agreement or Disagreement with another poster are often corroborating or refuting a statement in one of the former categories; so while these posts are relatively rare, they may prove valuable as evidence for whether or not to accept metadata suggested by previous posts.…”

“…Vaughn [7] includes an overview user annotation behavior as reported by institutions contributing to The Commons. Stvilia and Jorgensen [4] examined tagging and commenting over the Library of Congress Flickr photostream.…”

“…Three types of annotations are available: tags, notes, and comments. In this paper we focus on an examination of notes and comments, as these annotation types are less well studied than tags (eg, [1], [2], [4], [8]). …”

An Overview of Flickr Challenges and Research Opportunities

“…Stvilia and Jorgensen [45] investigated Flickr member activities and how these may assist on the automatic metadata creation. They worked on a set of historical photographs and their respective comments and discussions.…”