Tags, Taxonomies, and Tumblr style, oh my.

[silveradept]

I'm going to be a Grumpy Old on the Internet for a little bit. If you're not up for this, go ahead and pass this entry by.

I've seen this happen a few times in exchanges that I've participated in, but I would appreciate it when people do signups, that they provide some amount of direction for things to go in. Every now and then, I get a signup that's essentially "this fandom, any of the offered relationships, here are my Do Not Wants" and that is the sum total of the signup. Which I hope means "I'll be happy with whatever you write," but I usually would like to give someone a thing that they're definitely going to enjoy, and having a little bit of potential direction helps. Because otherwise, without any direction, I'm probably going to write something that I like or am interested in, and if the recipient didn't like it, it's probably because of the lack of detail put into the signup. I have had one of those particular signups happen where I never heard from the recipient at all about the finished work, which was doubly aggravating. So, y'know, write something, or have a dear creator letter, or some other things available for when someone is going to craft a gift work for you.

Additionally, Elsewhere on the Internet, there have been a couple of posts about whether readers are interested in reading the tags and/or the summaries of any given work, and there is a variety of responses from people about how essential either of those parts are. I've noticed a tendency in the responses where commentators mention that they're not interested in summaries that have spelling, punctuation, or grammar errors or that are a writer talking about their inexperience or difficulties in writing a good summary and that there are more than a few people who are uninterested in stories where the tags are "Tumblr-style" or "chatty" rather than a description of the characters and tropes involved in the work, or where there are "too many" tags, and I have a couple of things to mention. Everyone has their preferences, of course, in what they want to read, but I have to yell a touch in librarian at y'all if you think that there are too many tags, or that there's no value in the chatty tags, or even the self-deprecating ones, because of the push-pull relationship between taxonomy and folksonomy.

So, the Archive of Our Own has a controlled vocabulary, a taxonomy, that it uses to classify fic with. The canonical version of any given tag is the official taxonomic name it has. And because fans are fans, of course, there are a whole bunch of synonyms or variations that are linked to the official canonical tag, such that a person looking for a thing will get the same results as if they had searched for the official word or phrase. (I think those are "USE" references, but it's been a while since I had to classify them.) And then there are the related terms that are also official taxonomic words and phrases (the "SEE ALSO" reference) that allows someone to traverse the tree of taxonomy and find things that aren't exactly the same but are related to the thing before.

In the library world, we usually use something like the Library of Congress Subject Headings as the general place where the taxonomy lives, unless there is a more specific subset to use that's relevant to the type of library there is, like the Medical Subject Headings. So, where does any taxonomy get suggestions on what to add, subtract, or change? From the people using it and studying it. How people use words and classify things while not using a taxonomy gives insight into how words and ideas shift and move over time and what meanings are being associated with those words and ideas. That's the folksonomy, and it's usually the main source of conflict of understanding when a term has a specific. often taxonomic, meaning in a particular field versus the general folksonomic meaning, and someone thinks it's going to be great clickbait to use the folksonomic meaning in their headline or story when it's pretty clear at the source that the taxonomic meaning is meant.

Tagging, because it uses an uncontrolled vocabulary, is one of the most common ways of explaining a folksonomy. With tags enabled, a person can tag an image, a work, or any other piece of anything with whatever words are best to use for it, and those associations are saved along with the work or the image. The AO3 specifically allows authors to tag their works and for bookmarkers to tag works, although the bookmark tags are associated with the bookmark rather than the work, because adding bookmarker tags to a work is a vector for abuse. In any case, the tag can be one of the canonical tags, or it can be something else entirely that's intended to be descriptive in some way about the work.

If enough people use a tag, or at least, use tags all around a central theme, at a certain point, that tag, or that concept, is going to be incorporated into the taxonomy. At some point, with enough usage, a tag or concept gets made canonical and wrangled such that there's only the one official taxonomic representation and everything else is treated as a USE reference. There are usually rules and guidelines about which one of the many possibilities to select as the official taxonomic word/phrase, based on what would be the best, most accurate, or most descriptive word or phrase to use. The way that AO3 runs, the decisions that work creators make every time they add a tag to a work, they're building out the folkosonomy and making suggestions about what might be best included in the taxonomy. In that sense, there's really not such a thing as too many tags, as each tag is a node of description for a work. Now, someone can complain that certain tags are useless to search by, because some tags are so common, or complain that tags are being misused because someone keeps using that word or phrase without knowing what the real meaning of it is, or someone is tagging a thing that's secondary or minor as if it were more primary, and that's disappointing, especially for people who are searching for a rare pair, but I don't see how a thing can be tagged too much, because hypertext allows for a work to have all the possible relationships it can and to exist as an endpoint for all of its tags simultaneously.

If none of the above is persuasive, then think upon this instead: there exist browser toolkits and plugins to help curate the experience of a website by hiding content that is triggering or undesired. An item like Tumblr Savior or AO3 Savior works most prominently by using pattern-matching to scan the content of something and see if there's something in it that matches previously-defined criteria, then applying a behavior to that content based on the rules of the list where things got matched.

These tools are only as good as the content creators that are being scanned are. So, yes, there will always be a group of assholes who deliberately don't tag what they should, or mis-tag their works so that they can cause harm to others and evade those tools, but again, those people are assholes and are already uninterested in following norms and in being helpful to their fellow fen. For the rest of us, who generally believe that people should be able to curate their own experience and understand what is inside a work when deciding whether or not to go forward with it, the more accurately we can describe the work, in summaries, notes, and (most?) importantly, tags, the better those tools work and the less likely it is that someone will encounter one of our works and have it do harm to them or give them a thing they don't want. More information is better! Over-describing is preferable to under-describing, even if it creates a wall of tags that seem like they're unimportant or redundant.

(As a sidebar, I saw some discussion around the use of "Choose Not To Warn," and I find myself agreeing with its use as "we're not sure whether or not this has one of the big warnings, so we're choosing the safe option" and disagreeing with its use as "we don't want to spoil what happens in our work by using one of the big warnings", because if the work's impact relies on the reader/viewer not knowing what is going to happen, I feel like that might be a weakness in the writing. But perhaps I am a jaded grump who has seen the "shocking twist!" of a character dying without narrative warning happen a lot and I generally react to it with "ah, the actor found work elsewhere or wanted to leave the show" rather than feeling like the story itself had organically built up to this character's demise. And sometimes, when it is done especially poorly, there is often a certain amount of "there wasn't much effort here, was there?" along with it. On the principle of "more information is better", if a work fits one of the major warnings, then please use it. If the work would somehow suffer by revealing that a character will die at some point in the narrative, I feel like that means the work could use some additional work. But I am an old grump, and therefore when I shake my cane at you, it is up to you to decide whether I am wise or just grumpy.)

Furthermore, dismissing the "chatty" tags as not helpful is also a mistake, in my opinion, because those chatty tags are also imparting information about the work, and if there are enough people who describe their works in that way, or enough works described in that way, the concept in that tag should be added to the taxonomy. And the "chatty" tags and the self-deprecating summaries are often very useful for people who might want to do (properly sanctioned and controlled by IRBs) research into the attitudes of creators toward their works, or to make a point. I don't know the truth of this, but I could find out if, say, that self-deprecating tags are very common for the first few works as a creator is getting their feet underneath them and trying to not seem like they have all the answers. Or, because the demographic that uses those tags tends to be [Z], who have been socialized not to take credit for their work or to appear confident, lest they suffer social consequences or trolling comments meant to drive them away for the audacity of being [Z] and proud of it in that space.

Which brings me to the second reason I'm going to be a Grumpy Old One about this kind of commentary: gatekeeping people based on their mode of communication seems like the sort of thing that fans who have a history of being looked down upon and gatekept by others would want to avoid perpetuating. The "no, not every fic writer has won a Hugo Award" discussion got ugly in a hurry and exposed a lot of the underlying assumptions between the parts of fandom that are mostly curative (as in curation) and that see knowledge as currency and those parts of fandom that are transformative and see creativity as currency. The ongoing discussion and agitation to make the Archive a space where creators who are BIPOC can exist, can post works, can reimagine and be transformative of characters to tell the missing stories and the ways that make stories relevant to them without being snowed under in a deluge of racist behaviors and responses is important to making the Archive more truly Of Our Own. And the entire debacle that was the CoNZealand Hugo awards presentation, where it became abundantly clear what the opinions of the presenters (and, because they didn't curtail it, the concom) were about the presence of people who weren't cis het white men in the science fiction and fantasy fandoms and who should and shouldn't be given laurels for their accomplishments in the genre. Fandom isn't perfect, not by a long shot, but own goals are generally something to keep off the scoresheet wherever possible. But there's still a fairly significant amount of Fandom in general that seeks to block people from being part of itself for very petty reasons. (There are reasons to exclude people from your fandom. Being a known harasser, for one, or for consistent positions of being a racist, a TERF, or other -ist. Because someone doesn't look like you or ship like you isn't one of them.)

I'm not on Tumblr. I object to its censorship principles, I don't particularly care for the way that it favors interaction with things devoid of their context, nor does it offer anything near like the level of privacy controls and fine-grained ability to select who I want to see or not see content. It's not for me, but it is for others. I have seen and linked to beautiful pieces of writing and art on Tumblr, and I know that it has developed culture around the way that the interface does and does not replicate things when they're reblogged. Tags, for example, don't come along with a reblog, which makes the tags a space that can open up a myriad of possibilities to permit dialogue, of a sort, or recontextualizing something another person said by adding your own tags to it instead. Because the tags don't come with the reblog, they've become the whisper space where the blogger (or reblogger) gets to talk to their audience directly or to provide context or commentary for the post itself that will be lost when the post inevitably goes (farther) out into the ether. It's also relatively friendly to people whose primary Internet access device is a smartphone or tablet, so there's at least the perception that Tumblr skews younger.

So we have a situation where people who are participating in the conversation about fandom bringing their cultural norms to a new space. Tags provide vital information on Tumblr, and so there's no reason not to have the tags provide vital information on AO3, either. For fandom to survive, it has to progress through the generations. If you have one generation desperately clinging to the idea that they have the Platonic form of fandom and that all other ways are wrong and inferior, well, the exercise is left to the reader, but I doubt your useful example is that far away.

This does not mean everyone has to be welcoming and accommodating, because there are always going to be people who have been hurt deeply by ignorance (or malice masquerading as such) who do not owe their time or effort to anyone to educate them and are squarely and correctly focused on curating their own experiences so as to avoid being further harmed. But it does mean that if there is the capacity to welcome and educate, or, even better, to listen hard and determine whether the thing that's new is actually actively harmful, or a new culture that will take some getting used to, some understanding, and then doing some work together to make fandom better, then that's what should be happening.

The library world occasionally has a flash of insight, often in the form of another study about low morale experiences, at how much direct public service staff have to deal with abusive and threatening situations from both members of the public and from their co-workers and supervisors. What tends to develop out of those experiences is that the people who remain after others quite rightly bail on libraries because of that toxicity seem to believe that the experience of being abused is a badge of pride and honor, and that those who haven't experienced enough of that abuse aren't True Scotsmen. Because, well, brains and trauma and survivorship, really. When you're stuck in a situation where there will be abuse and there's not support from the people who should be supporting you to get rid of the abuse, nor any effective channel for stopping the abuse, what's left is to endure, and sharing stories with others about the abuse endured is often a way of building camaraderie and gaining a certain level of respect for having suffered it, because while everyone knows that the correct thing to do is to stop tolerating abuse, they also know that without structural change, without systemic change, it won't be possible, and after enough times of trying without result, well, you burn out, and then you leave. Hearing someone say they're not interested in your work for reasons other than the work itself is discouraging them from participating, and enough of that and a person leaves.

Fandom is, at its Platonic form, welcoming and inclusive and full of people who are committed to being responsible with it. Both individually responsible in their own choices to not consciously perpetuate systemic injustices or reinforce -isms, but collectively as well, to listen when people say they're hurt, to find effective ways of remedying the hurt, and to find ways of avoiding the hurt in the future. Subject, of course, to the understanding that no entity can be neutral and that while there is space to explore a lot of terrible things in creative work, bringing those things out of the creative space, or trying to hide behind the creative space when hurting someone outside of it, will be met with consequences.

I guess I'm cranky at this because while "don't like, don't read" is a bedrock of fandom, it's easy to step over into "don't like, don't read, and you shouldn't, either" and it's in that space where we start having to make decisions about which kinds of works are to be allowed and which aren't, and on what things we can say "eh, your kink is not my kink, and that's okay," and what things we say "No. Those things are actively harmful to our community and won't be allowed." And which of those things are individual decisions that need tools for individuals to use to opt in to what they want or out of things they don't want, and which of those things are community decisions about what is and isn't allowed, and what the consequences of those decisions are, who is best able to tell fandom what those consequences are, and who is tasked with the responsibility of enforcing those community standards. If there's already a segment of fandom that thinks fanfic should never have been awarded a Hugo, and a segment of fandom that categorically refuses to read a work if the tags are "chatty" or if the summary is self-deprecating, because they see it as an indictment of the quality of the work, then what happens when the big stuff comes around? Or worse, when the big stuff has been here for a while already?

Mostly, at least for this, though, here's the teal deer: don't diss someone because they're using the tags differently, please. They're providing information for you about the work in the best way they know how.

Comments

[shipperslist]

This is a Very Good Post and I felt called out. In a good way, I assure you.

I can easily admit that I don't like ramble-y tags just like I don't especially care about A/N that are basically just a parallel story or in some cases, a completely new story about what the author's brother's teacher came up with. But usually I just roll my eyes at them and either click "next chapter" or hit back. The reason I generally don't like the tumbleh-style tags is that in many cases I've seen, the author chooses to tag with rambling story instead of using the perfectly appropriate tags AO3 already has. I don't mind being chatty if the additional tag list starts with the appropriate tags––whatever they might be. But if the whole additional tag is "anal sex" and then a whole page of rambling, it unfortunately strikes me as unappealing and I move on. I know that examples would be helpful here but they would also point at the creators and that's not something I want to do.

Uh. I don't even know if this comment has a point. I'm pretty sure it paints me as an asshole, though. :/

[silveradept]

I mean, I'm sure that's are plenty of people somewhere else that might say that, but to me, what your comment does is highlight the communication style difference I was talking about. For a person coming to AO3 who interacts primarily on Tumblr's platform and social norms, rable-tags and author notes with seemingly unrelated material is normal and probably fulfills a social convention. Not being on Tumblr, nor trained in anthropology, I couldn't say what, but I suspect it is there.

For people who are raised that tags and summaries are supposed to be strictly about the work, use the taxonomy already in place, and generally keep the personal to, say, the blog post promoting the work, this is jarring and weird.

It's in the same family as cultures where interrupting and talking over each other is normal and friendly versus cultures where waiting your turn to speak and only one person speaks at a time is proper, I think.

But, y'know, people get to curate their experiences according to their own criteria. I'm mostly grumpy that there's a value judgment being applied to that communication style, because it's also in the same family of people who believe that AAVE is somehow morally deficient or lesser, when the reality is that its different (and quite sophisticated, from what I can gather from the linguists who have studied it.)

[ineptshieldmaid]

, I saw some discussion around the use of "Choose Not To Warn," and I find myself agreeing with its use as "we're not sure whether or not this has one of the big warnings, so we're choosing the safe option" and disagreeing with its use as "we don't want to spoil what happens in our work by using one of the big warnings", because if the work's impact relies on the reader/viewer not knowing what is going to happen, I feel like that might be a weakness in the writing.

For myself, I have used it in the past for 'i find one of the major warning categories either baffling or problematic', and I'm shifting to using it in general WHILE giving warnings in the tags. Choses Not To Warn is the only way I have of slapping a big 'I'm not a wizard or a mind reader, and you are an adult responsible for your own reading and for, should you find that I have not predicted your personal trigger, behaving like a civil person about it'.

[silveradept]

That's makes sense as a usage, since you're also then providing the information that would otherwise be obscured in the tags, and "I'm not a wizard or mind reader" might be a more accurate way of rendering what I said, rather than "not sure".

[ineptshieldmaid]

Contractually with the AO3, one is only obliged to warn or decline to warn for the Big Four, but i found certain fandoms very... 2008 LJ about HOW DARE you include the thing you have ruined my day!

[silveradept]

Speaking of cultural differences, there we are.

Although I think there's a good argument that the big four need to be expanded into a bigger list to cover more of the common space that could cause harm. I lack the expertise to say what that expansion should be, but thankfully, there are experts wrangling that already.

[alexseanchai]

But perhaps I am a jaded grump who has seen the "shocking twist!" of a character dying without narrative warning happen a lot and I generally react to it with "ah, the actor found work elsewhere or wanted to leave the show" rather than feeling like the story itself had organically built up to this character's demise. […] If the work would somehow suffer by revealing that a character will die at some point in the narrative, I feel like thta means the work could use some additional work.

okay so how would you handle a story where a lot of narrative tension is riding on whether a major character will survive? like, it won't be surprising either way. depending on what genre tags the story has, one or the other result may be dissatisfying, but that's a different question. and labeling the fic either MCD or No Warnings will inevitably give the answer away up front, denying everyone the possibility of going in unspoiled. without closing off the option for people who want to be spoiled, because the author could (say) CNTW while putting the answer in the end notes and pointing there from the beginning notes.

[silveradept]

I am unsure that works that set up "will they live or die?" as a narrative frame are actually about that, and that where the narrative tension and meat is in the consequences of whether someone lives or dies. In a vacuum, "do they live or die?" mostly returns "Error: why should I care?" and that's usually where I think the focus and the locus lie. Like, "if they live, the medicine gets to Nome and everyone in the village lives. If they die, the medicine is lost and an entire village goes with it" is what I expect out of that construction, some other stakes that this linchpin will decide, and that's where I think the story is. And how the linchpin got involved, or relates to the bigger frame is important, because the author wants the audience to have an opinion about them, but it seems to me that the narrative tension is about the bigger context. And knowing whether or not the linchpin dies doesn't necessarily mean you know how the story concludes, because there are plenty of "character is only mostly dead" stories or "this character we've been following dies, but the traveling companion who has been in the background this whole time picks up the quest and legs it across the finish line" stories. Or "the MCD that dies is the villain, the hero is just fine, thanks" stories where it's not a guarantee that the tag says what it thinks it does.

Even for a story worth a single character, whose narrative frame is whether they live or die, I still feel like the story that is being told is all about everything around the question of living or dying, and the living or dying is part of the story, but not such a large part that it needs to be obscured.

Hamilton says straight up at the beginning that A. Ham is going to get shot by A. Burr, but the point of the story is what led up to that shot. Even if they hadn't foregrounded it, the story would still have been about how the duel came to be, and I have trouble envisioning how not knowing that he was going to get shot would have changed the impact of the work. (Maybe it's a bad example.)

Any clearer or more coherent?

[alexseanchai]

Hamilton's not a great example because I remember reading in a history textbook that he died in a duel. I don't remember which history textbook, but my money's on the one ninth graders in my high school were using my tenth grade year. (there were some scheduling shenanigans on account of that district and the previous district had a difference of opinion on the importance of Mississippi Studies.)

I'll ponder the rest.

[moon_custafer]

I’d argue that if that question is a source of narrative tension for much of the story, then it’s not an example of the “SHOCKING TWIST” trope— that’s more the kind of character death that comes out of left field with no foreshadowing; the kind of thing I saw someone describe as making the audience say “OMG I didn’t see that coming” rather than “OMG I *should have seen* that coming.” If you see what I mean?

[alexseanchai]

There's no need to argue that, since I phrased my comment explicitly to rule out the Shocking Twist! sorts of major character death.

[moon_custafer]

Sorry, I misunderstood your comment.

[moon_custafer]

I generally like chatty tags— for one thing, I find they can give some hint of the tone of the story without giving away the entire thing.

My only real tag beef that I can think of off the top of my head is when the author tags in every member of an ensemble cast, so the story turns up when I search by character, but then does not actually contain any mentions of that character (presumably they’re somewhere in the same building, but not involved in the action.) However I’ve begun using Select All>Copy>Paste to transfer the text of the story to a Word doc where I can use Find to check how often the name of the character I’m interested in actually appears.

[silveradept]

That particular problem would be less of one if someone could write the miraculously accepted by all pan-fandom guide of when a character has been in the frame long enough to deserve a tag. The rules for film credits might be a good place to start crafting such a guide, though.

[sylvaine]

Or if AO3 had been set up from the start to differentiate between main and side characters *sigh*

[silveradept]

This is true.

I am beginning to think that whatever the next major iteration of the Archive is (with more warnings, or main/side designations, or some other major features), it seems like they're going to have to ask people to import their works into the new format from the old one, so that the new things get propagated into the system. Which sounds a lot like a lot of work for people with an established corpus.

[sylvaine]

It sounds like a ridiculous amount of work, and inevitably leaves works with absent authors outside of the system, but it's the only way I can see it working. Although I kind of expect AO3 to never change anything this fundamentally because it would involve so much work. (And probably a lot of abuse heaped on their volunteer team.)

[firecat]

Guilty of not giving any direction when I signed up for my first exchange, because what I want is for the person assigned to me to write something that they like or are interested in. But I've since seen enough people say distressed things about this that if I ever sign up for another exchange, I'll at least make that more explicit.

I personally don't understand people wanting something very specific out of an exchange and complaining when they don't get it. Perhaps it's because I'm an editor by trade, which means I know how hard it is to write to spec. (Retired, but I made my living fixing other people's attempts to write to spec.)

I love the term "whisper space" for conversational tags.

Agree completely with you about the different uses of tags, and about True Scotsmanism in general, and specifically in fandom.

[silveradept]

Some of that anxiety, I think, comes from the potential space to work in. As tippetariuswrites quoted Sondheim in the Violet Sunshine Challenge comments,

If you told me to write a love song tonight, I'd have a lot of trouble. But if you tell me to write a love song about a girl with a red dress who goes into a bar and is on her fifth martini and is falling off her chair, that's a lot easier, and it makes me free to say anything I want.

And there's sometimes the worry that even if it's not in the DNW, what I think of as an enjoyable work with my headcanon might be different than the recipient's ideas and they might not actually like it. Having a direction helps the creativity and also helps define a lane that can be used to make things more likely that the recipient will like it.

Whisper space is not my original idea, but I forget who I linked to that had the idea.

There's a lot of gatekeeping of the True Scotsman sort when the gatekeeping shows up. The problem is, the script I was handed about that was essentially "take pity on them for their inability to live in the real world and leave them alone, for they will either to fester and fail and eventually become NEETs or reality will intrude when they are unceremoniously dumped out of their parents' house and have to learn how to put away their fantasy life and be normal, for once."

Reality, as usual, was far stranger, as it turned them into Puppies, incels, Gamergaters, and most terrifyingly, techbros.

[firecat]

I guess I think of an exchange involving specific fandoms, characters, and tropes as closer to the girl in the red dress etc. than to the unadulterated love song, but I get your point.

I'm sick of reality being strange in that particular way.

[silveradept]

Oh, it is, absolutely. It narrows the space down precipitously, only for us to find out that there is an entire universe inside a single fandom with those characters, so there's yet more narrowing that can be helpful.

Yeah, reality is the worst-written reality show I've seen, and yet it keeps getting renewed.

[itsamellama]

Really enjoyed reading this post. I don’t have much else to say, other than I totes understand and honestly dig how places can evolve into things they weren’t quite meant for. (RP accounts, anyone? Haha.)

[silveradept]

Humans are endlessly creative and find ways to do things on their preferred platforms. (Including things like specifically taking advantage of bugs in the system to do specific actions.)