The Social (Tagging) Act of Reading

Abstract

On Flickr, a Web-based service for managing and sharing digital images, reading and tagging come together in ways that reveal how people -- as individuals organizing their own photographs as well as making them available for discovery by others -- think about reading when they attempt to depict it in images and in words. In this pilot study of the tags assigned to a sample of 100 photographs tagged with the terms book and reading, only 80 of the 561 total tags were used more than once. The broad range of unique tags suggests an idiosyncratic approach to labeling that makes it difficult to draw conclusions about images of reading. Consequently, additional searches were conducted on Flickr and the results are reported and interpreted. The paper concludes with a discussion of proposed follow-up research.