[Welcome back to December Days. This year, thanks to a suggestion from ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]
...although I'm not actually all that good at it, myself. I mean, I know the shape of something like hurt/comfort or angst or fluff, but that doesn't necessarily mean I can spot it in my own work when it comes time to post.
Let's back up a bit. I'm a taxonomist by trade -- even though I'm not in the official position of creating records or assigning collections and classifications to all the things I look after, I'm still very invested in the idea and the business of grouping things together in useful ways that make them easier to find later. (Except my link posts, which really don't have specific tagging and I rely on being able to search back in my own journal for specific things where warranted.) I have occasionally joked that if I were to be transformed into an RPG character, I would receive huge bonuses to bring able to find something, so long as it was arranged in some sort of deducible order.
I admit my own classification system, such that it is, may not make sense to anyone else, and it probably has a lot to do with brain (mis)function coping that wants to keep active things in sight so they don't get forgotten, but I was still able to reason my way through finding where I had put something, so that was good.
In any case, at least while I was studying it, there were a couple ideas in mind about classification, and they mostly depended on where, if anywhere, the authority came from. Taxonomies often have a central authority governing what language gets used, how the classification gets applied, where it has scope, and how it gets represented. They are formal structures and they admit change fairly slowly and methodically, when needed. Things like the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual or the Dewey Decimal Classification are taxonomic.
Some of the Archive of Our Own runs on taxonomies, too - there are the canonical versions of fandoms, pairings, tropes, and so forth. Those get decided by various moderators and tag wranglers so that there's one standard tag that applies to all works that fit the definition of the tag described. One of the best things about having taxonomic classification is that it makes things way easier to search, assuming you know the correct vocabulary to use, and you have a higher degree of confidence you find everything under that definition.
Of course, humans don't think in taxonomic terms a lot of the time. We often use imprecise words in our normal conversations. Things like "bugs", which usually mean anything in the phylum Arthropoda, regardless of whether they are true bugs, arachnids, lepidopterans, or other creatures. "Bugs" share certain characteristics of size, multiples of legs, and creep factor, though, which is why they persist as a supergroup outside of the formal Linnean taxonomy. These sorts of imprecise categorizing make image searching, natural language processing, and a host of other things that are common and intuitive to humans absolutely frustrating to computers (if computers could currently express human emotions spontaneously or intelligently) and to searchers alike. The human and the computer can't understand each other. Garbage in, garbage out. Except the human expects the computer to understand them and stops giving eyeballs to advertisers when that doesn't happen.
In steps "folksonomy," although there may be a newer term for it, which is essentially meant as a companion to the official taxonomy that helps make those intuitive (to humans of the same experiences) connections and links together things that may not seem to be related at the time, or whose relationships exist outside the official taxonomy. Tags are generally folksonomic, even if some of them end up forming or joining the taxonomy because the authority on charge of the taxonomy sees the pattern and decides to standardize it. Even for things that might only loosely fit to the pattern established, just so that it's all grouped in a single place. Because tags are definitely the space where someone wants to get everything all at one click.
Between the taxonomy and the folksonomy, in theory, should be a system that works well enough for humans that they can find what they want by using whatever language they have to hand. In theory. Because humans are interesting creatures and always come up with new and inventive ways of naming things.
So, if you would like maximum visibility for your work when you post it to a place, archive, site, or otherwise, tag your work appropriately so that it may be sorted into the appropriate buckets. AO3 has certain mandatory tags regarding Archive Warnings, for example, and there are review processes in place to make sure those tags get applied properly, either by the creator or by someone who takes the time to go "hey, this thing should be tagged with this!" because they don't want anyone else reading the thing without warnings. Beyond the mandatory tags, though, various plot elements, tropes, alternate universes, structural elements, spoiler status, and the occasional joke tag all get applied so as to make the work more descriptive to the person potentially interested in investing time in it. Or, for that matter, knowing that a work is going to stand on their toes, their triggers, or their squicks. Warning someone away is as valid a use of tags as drawing them in.
Please, tag your work appropriately, and see if there are other tags that might apply if you're not sure there are enough descriptors to go with your work. The people who are organizing, indexing, and eventually making things available for searching will thank you a lot for doing this valuable part beforehand. It will help confused people like me get a better grasp of what tags to apply to my own work for the same purposes.
alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. Suggestions for topics are most definitely welcome! There's still a lot of space to cover.]...although I'm not actually all that good at it, myself. I mean, I know the shape of something like hurt/comfort or angst or fluff, but that doesn't necessarily mean I can spot it in my own work when it comes time to post.
Let's back up a bit. I'm a taxonomist by trade -- even though I'm not in the official position of creating records or assigning collections and classifications to all the things I look after, I'm still very invested in the idea and the business of grouping things together in useful ways that make them easier to find later. (Except my link posts, which really don't have specific tagging and I rely on being able to search back in my own journal for specific things where warranted.) I have occasionally joked that if I were to be transformed into an RPG character, I would receive huge bonuses to bring able to find something, so long as it was arranged in some sort of deducible order.
I admit my own classification system, such that it is, may not make sense to anyone else, and it probably has a lot to do with brain (mis)function coping that wants to keep active things in sight so they don't get forgotten, but I was still able to reason my way through finding where I had put something, so that was good.
In any case, at least while I was studying it, there were a couple ideas in mind about classification, and they mostly depended on where, if anywhere, the authority came from. Taxonomies often have a central authority governing what language gets used, how the classification gets applied, where it has scope, and how it gets represented. They are formal structures and they admit change fairly slowly and methodically, when needed. Things like the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual or the Dewey Decimal Classification are taxonomic.
Some of the Archive of Our Own runs on taxonomies, too - there are the canonical versions of fandoms, pairings, tropes, and so forth. Those get decided by various moderators and tag wranglers so that there's one standard tag that applies to all works that fit the definition of the tag described. One of the best things about having taxonomic classification is that it makes things way easier to search, assuming you know the correct vocabulary to use, and you have a higher degree of confidence you find everything under that definition.
Of course, humans don't think in taxonomic terms a lot of the time. We often use imprecise words in our normal conversations. Things like "bugs", which usually mean anything in the phylum Arthropoda, regardless of whether they are true bugs, arachnids, lepidopterans, or other creatures. "Bugs" share certain characteristics of size, multiples of legs, and creep factor, though, which is why they persist as a supergroup outside of the formal Linnean taxonomy. These sorts of imprecise categorizing make image searching, natural language processing, and a host of other things that are common and intuitive to humans absolutely frustrating to computers (if computers could currently express human emotions spontaneously or intelligently) and to searchers alike. The human and the computer can't understand each other. Garbage in, garbage out. Except the human expects the computer to understand them and stops giving eyeballs to advertisers when that doesn't happen.
In steps "folksonomy," although there may be a newer term for it, which is essentially meant as a companion to the official taxonomy that helps make those intuitive (to humans of the same experiences) connections and links together things that may not seem to be related at the time, or whose relationships exist outside the official taxonomy. Tags are generally folksonomic, even if some of them end up forming or joining the taxonomy because the authority on charge of the taxonomy sees the pattern and decides to standardize it. Even for things that might only loosely fit to the pattern established, just so that it's all grouped in a single place. Because tags are definitely the space where someone wants to get everything all at one click.
Between the taxonomy and the folksonomy, in theory, should be a system that works well enough for humans that they can find what they want by using whatever language they have to hand. In theory. Because humans are interesting creatures and always come up with new and inventive ways of naming things.
So, if you would like maximum visibility for your work when you post it to a place, archive, site, or otherwise, tag your work appropriately so that it may be sorted into the appropriate buckets. AO3 has certain mandatory tags regarding Archive Warnings, for example, and there are review processes in place to make sure those tags get applied properly, either by the creator or by someone who takes the time to go "hey, this thing should be tagged with this!" because they don't want anyone else reading the thing without warnings. Beyond the mandatory tags, though, various plot elements, tropes, alternate universes, structural elements, spoiler status, and the occasional joke tag all get applied so as to make the work more descriptive to the person potentially interested in investing time in it. Or, for that matter, knowing that a work is going to stand on their toes, their triggers, or their squicks. Warning someone away is as valid a use of tags as drawing them in.
Please, tag your work appropriately, and see if there are other tags that might apply if you're not sure there are enough descriptors to go with your work. The people who are organizing, indexing, and eventually making things available for searching will thank you a lot for doing this valuable part beforehand. It will help confused people like me get a better grasp of what tags to apply to my own work for the same purposes.
