Social Tagging as interpretative production: liminality and information practice

 This paper examines recent approaches to tagging and crowdsourcing as communicative practice, viewing social tagging and crowdsourced annotation
as liminal communicative practice that throws into relief many conventional assumptions regarding information roles, actions, performances and functions.
In this paper, tags and annotations are viewed as paratextual elements, at one and the same time responses, interpretations and productive communicative
gestures linked to other documents, themselves also productions and responses. Taggers operate as readers and writers, consumers and producers.
yet currently in most systems the opportunities for tagging and communicative practice are limited to the inclusion of one word tags or masheduptags. There is space for new collaborative tagging models to be developed that draw on richer forms of user generated content, perhaps through storytelling, for example, and that develop the creativity inherent in tagging practice to design enhanced KO models and systems.
It is in this context that this paper proposes to examine a range of current tagging and annotation practices, and to discuss novel approaches to the representation of knowledge that capitalise on tagging as liminal, productive and performative information practice.