An innovative use for social tagging has been applied to researching “Persons and Things in Medieval Europe,” a history course taught by Professor Dan Smail at Harvard. Using a tool called the Collaborative Research Tool (developed with the assistance of the Instructional Computing Group), student teams explore a sampling of all the genres of sources available from a given region, ranging from archaeological site reports and art to chronicles, private acts, and saints’ lives. The students are assigned groups of sources, in translation, from a given region and when they encounter passages of interest, they create and tag virtual note cards that are added to a database. Final research papers and even the lectures themselves are based on the primary sources compiled by students on the note cards.
Below is a sample virtual note card from the course:
Social tagging offers is a unique approach to collecting and analyzing the broadly distributed primary source materials for medieval European culture and society. By tagging key passages from a variety of works and entering them into a database, students can compare how different medieval texts describe, for example, dress or warfare. The note cards become the basis for a complex intertexual discourse on a broad range of medieval topics. Also, by having students tag the virtual cards using their own language, they begin to assimilate the primary sources in a more personal way. The tagging system also allows students to share their virtual cards with peers and view (in the form of a tag cloud) the overall tagging habits of the class as a whole.
Here is an example of a tag cloud with tags occurring 5 or more times:
This particular social tagging application is very well-defined—the user community is limited to students in the course, the sources that students read and tag are largely predetermined, examples of appropriate tags are provided (although students ultimately choose their own). Yet, these parameters help to ensure that a common understanding exists in the classroom in terms of what is being tagged, by whom, and for what purpose.
It would be interesting to see the results of sharing tags/note cards between courses in different academic departments or institutions. The research of art history students studying medieval dress in paintings, for example, would greatly be enriched by the primary sources tagged by Professor Smail’s students, and vice versa.
I think the idea of using something like tag clouds for analysing data is already known since some time. For example, in qualitative data analysis (QDA) you use a code network to code a set of qualitative data (like interview records). Check for example the method Template Analysis (http://www.hud.ac.uk/hhs/research/template_analysis/index.htm) to see how it works. I used this method to analyse a set of fieldnotes taken during an ethnographic study (see http://quality.hpfsc.de/) and it proved to be a very valuable tool!
Sebastian
What kind of software/language is used to develop an application like this?
Ryan Overbey, the Presidential Instructional Technology Fellow who collaborated on the CRT tool, provides the following technical notes:
The Collaborative Research Tool is built on a foundation of CakePHP and MySQL. CakePHP is a rapid application development framework, essentially a Ruby on Rails implementation in PHP. It values convention over configuration, and allows you to access databases and
make AJAX calls with minimalist code. CakePHP uses MVC
(Model-View-Controller) logic, which makes it easy to add newfunctionality to different parts of the system.
Let’s look at a brief example, to see how easy it is to code useful applications using MVC frameworks, URL routing, and other goodies from CakePHP.
We had a tag cloud implemented, at the URL /tags/cloud. By accessing this URL, the user is actually calling on tags_controller.php, which has a function:
function cloud( )
{
$this->set(‘tags’, $this->Tag->findAll( NULL, NULL, ‘name ASC’ ) );
}
This function simply builds an array of all the tags, ordered
alphabetically, and passes it to the view file, which would in turn display this array in nice, cloud-like fashion. All the database logic is handled by our Tag model.
Nice, but as more and more tags are entered the display becomes overwhelming. The professor wanted an option to see only popular tags. So all we had to do was this:
function cloud ( $minimum = 1 )
{
$this->set(‘tags’, $this->Tag->findAll( ‘count >= ‘ . $minimum,
NULL, ‘name ASC’));
}
Now the cloud function searches for all tags whose count is at least a certain number. We can access this by going to the url /tags/cloud/5, or /tags/cloud/3. So if the professor ever wants the “popular” tags to be defined as 8 or more, rather than 5 or more, we can simply change the parameter.
Rapid application frameworks like Ruby on Rails or CakePHP make building a complex tool like the CRT so much easier. I was able to spend most of my time implementing cool features, rather than mucking around with database connections, form generation, and all the other busy-work that a decent web application requires.