Bringing Order out of Chaos

[osprey_archer]

It’s become increasingly difficult to find anything on my Dreamwidth, so I’ve decided to try to bring order out of tag chaos - or not exactly chaos; most things are tagged, but when you have nearly a thousand things tagged “books,” it’s very hard to sift through all that and find, say, just the Eva Ibbotson books that you’ve read.

Drunk on success after sorting out the television tags, I moved on to the monster category of “history,” and ran aground on the shoals of periodization. In particular, I have read an awful lot of books that fall in between the years 1870 and the First World War-ish, which is traditionally divided into the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, which strikes me as a fairly artificial divide, as evidenced by the fact that many books sort of sprawl across both eras.

I could just tag it all “The New Girl,” in reference to my project about girls’ literature around the turn of the twentieth century, on the grounds that anything else about the time period is background material…

And I clearly need to have a specific tag for the Chicago World’s Fair.

Must also decide if the Classical Antiquity tag should be just for history, or if I should fold in the Iliad & the Odyssey as well. I think the latter.

But that’s already edging toward Books, the 900-entry tag behemoth, which I want to sort by genre and author - at least for authors I read frequently; I don’t want to tag every author - although that has set me pondering how to tag an author like, for instance, Jane Austen (for whom I already have a tag), when some of the entries are about her books, some of them are about movies based on her books, and some of them are about history books that might be about Austen but might also be using Austen’s name recognition to draw readers in to a book that is really mostly about Regency England.

The nice thing about a tag like “Jane Austen” is that it covers all these possibilities, whereas “Author: Jane Austen” seems more specific - but at the same time it’s so much easier to find things if all the authors are grouped together under the tag form “Author: Author Name.” Probably I should just suck it up and use it, even if it is slight clumsy for certain uses.

Comments

[asakiyume]

I know rachelmanija does something like what you describe in your last paragraph. A system like that, even if it's more cumbersome than you usually need, would definitely help you out when you're looking for specific things (provided you do remember to tag stuff... just now I was looking for something and I had left off a key tag -_-), and it would give you a framework to use, which can be handy for cutting down on cognitive load.

But that's the frustrating and marvelous things about taxonomies (which tags create, right? Ways of grouping stuff): they don't account for all the ways we think about things. The areas where a taxonomy--any taxonomy--runs into trouble are always fascinating.

[osprey_archer]

Ha, yes, the dreaded forgotten tag. I know that there's going to be a long tail on this process where I keep finding posts where such and such a thing isn't tagged and going WHYYYYY.

I have also discovered that I compare books to other books a LOT and am now contemplating just how in-depth that comparison needs to get in order to warrant a tag. If I just mention The Changeling is that enough? Or should there be more to it than that? THE QUESTION.

[asakiyume]

Yeah: tag too liberally,** and you're left with the same sifting problem that tags are intended to avoid, but be too stingy with tags, and you don't catch relevant stuff.

I've wondered that about how much of a mention should warrant tagging... I've been completely inconsistent in how I answered that question.

**back years ago I used to tag things in which I put photos with "photos." Boy did that end up being a useless tag. Literally useless. I suppose partly that it was too general a tag, but sheesh.

[osprey_archer]

There are moments when I think that the book tag is simply too broad, like your photo tag, because I'm creeping up on 1,000 posts with that tag...

But on the other hand it's useful to have a broad tag to catch, say, posts about art made out of books, or about bookstores, or about books where I don't want to tag the author because I'm not likely to read any other books by that person... or things like that.

[silverusagi]

I feel you on the tag thing. I think I have things organized, and then later I decide I could be doing it better.

[osprey_archer]

Things could always be more organized. This always seems to be true.

[thisbluespirit]

Ooh, tagging! Findability! I approve hugely. :-D

Also good luck with it, although of course, be reassured: the organize tags function is there so you can change your mind and spend hours/days renaming them all again...

(Hmm, is that reassuring? Possibly not.)

[osprey_archer]

Shhhh, I don't need encouragement to rename all my tags! That's just dangerous.

[littlerhymes]

I definitely would just tag it Jane Austen! If you are going through your tag later, you want to be able to find ALL the relevant posts, right?

[osprey_archer]

I've left the tag on all the posts but renamed it to author: Jane Austen, so we'll see how I like this compromise.

On the plus side, it's now filed with all the other author tags! Easy to find. But on the minus side it feels a little weird to have "author: Jane Austen" on say a movie like Austenland, which is inspired by Austen's works but not, in fact, by Jane Austen in any sense. (And there are other author tags that have related issues; Shakespeare, the Brontes, Tamora Pierce...)

In the end we'll just have to see which wins: neatness of organization scheme, or strict accuracy?