MSc Computer Science (Internet Technology)
MSc Project Web 2.0 - Tagging
Initial Aims
Play VideoTag: www.videotag.co.uk. Tag some of youtube.com's funniest videos, score points and reach the top of the leaderboard. But beware, if you tag too obviously you might find the pitfalls and loose points.
Briefly my research developed into a bit of an obsession with the semantics of tags. Not only am I fascinated in how and why people tag but the types of tag they enter. The ESP Game inspired the idea of creating a game environment for which to tag videos sourced from YouTube - VideoTag. The object of the game is to generate tags that could eventually be used as descriptions of the videos files to improve accessibility and search. Analysis will include comparing the tags players enter. I expect to find a longtail effect when the tags and their frequency are plotted on a graph. I am curious to find out if the structure of the game will effect this longtail. More information on the research goals of the project can be found here. It includes a poster outlining the research.
Report Abstract
Through discussion and analysis of current research in collaborative tagging systems, an emerging area of research was discovered, improving accessibility and search of visual resources through tagging. Of particular interest were two tagging projects ESP Game and Steve.Museum, where users were encouraged to tag images to improve accessibility and search of images. VideoTag extends this research by harnessing the user motivations of Play and Competition to increase and improve the meta data of a selection of YouTube videos through tagging.
The VideoTag tagging experiment consisted of a one player game where users were encouraged to tag a selection of sixty carefully chosen, funny YouTube Videos. The videos were separated over five difficulty levels. Gameplay was carefully planned in order to encourage users to tag the videos more descriptively, using tags of a subordinate rather than basic cognitive level. The experiment was uncontrolled with random users being attracted to the game through promotion on various Web 2.0 sites.
Analysis of the results focussed on whether a game environment is beneficial to encouraging users to tag videos. Quantitative methods of analysis found VideoTag to be successful at increasing the amount of tags per video compared to YouTube. A long tail effect was found to present in the tag data which allowed for qualitative analysis of the quality of the tags entered based on their cognitive level.
As only a small selection of videos were used, tag data generated by the VideoTag experiment is not sufficient to test whether the data can improve search for those selected videos, or create descriptions to improve accessibility for visually impaired users. Analysis and evaluation does discuss how VideoTag proves as a concept, game based tagging could be used to improve accessibility and search and there is scope for future research .
A page was created to show all tags generated for all videos in VideoTag. View all VideoTag tags
Here's a link to my blog about my research project: web2research.wordpress.com You can find a lot more information about the development process and some research discoveries.
Here's a link to my citeulike page where i have bookmarked all relevent conference papers :
www.citeulike.org/user/mook3000/
My del.icio.us bookmarks - everything i've been researching.
