This post is the third in a series about past projects.
Tagging provides a means for users to associate personally salient keywords or labels with content items, enabling them to find the content later via information they are predisposed to recognize or recall. Collaborative tagging systems such as del.icio.us publicly expose individual users’ associations between content items and tags, thereby providing visibility into words others have used to tag similar items. In this research, we focused on the social bookmarking website del.icio.us, as a case study of a collaborative tagging system supporting both personal and shared information management. del.icio.us is an online application that allows users to save and tag their own web bookmarks so they are accessible from any networked computer. Other research has suggested that a socially constructed shared vocabulary might emerge on del.icio.us. We conducted several investigations, including a qualitative interview study, computer modeling, and two quantitative analyses of tagging data scraped from del.icio.us, and found evidence for strong influence of a user’s existing organization and little evidence to support the formation of a socially constructed vocabulary.
Rader, E. and Wash, R. (2008). Influences on Tag Choices in del.icio.us. Proceedings of CSCW 2008. 
Wash, R. and Rader, E. (2008). Understanding del.icio.us Tag Choice Using Simulations. iSchools Conference 2008.
Wash, R. and Rader, E. (2007). Public Bookmarks and Private Benefits: An Analysis of Incentives in Social Computing. Proceedings of ASIS&T Annual Meeting ‘07.
Rader, E. and Wash, R. (2006). Tagging with del.icio.us: Social or Selfish? Poster Presented at CSCW 2006.
