Current Research
There are three main strands to my research that aim to answer the question: How to encourage effective tagging of internet videos through online tagging games?Play
I am interested in the philosophy of play and how this is applied to online games in order to understand why people engage in online play. I want to understand why people play online games? What features they expect in an engaging and fun game and what factors of gameplay make users return to a game time after time. I am looking at the theory of online game design and the fundamentals of designing interactivity. I want to apply the theory to tagging games to see if tagging games can be designed to appeal to a broader audience and be 'fun' enough to be played regularly and yet still generate useful textual data.
Tagging Games
How can I research video tagging games without developing my own? I am currently redeveloping VideoTag and will be re-launching soon. I want to find out:
- Can tagging games be fun enough to engage users and encourage repetitive play?
- Are tagging games a useful tool at encouraging users to tag videos?
- How effective is game-based tagging at encouraging useful tags?
Tag Classification
In addition to researching the element of fun involved with tagging games, I am also interested in classifying the tags that they generate. Through classification of the types of tag users enter in video sharing sites
I want to be able to draw comparisons between those results and the results of a classification of the tags generated by video tagging games. Some questions I want to answer through analysis of tag classification:
- What constitutes a useful tag?
- How many tags is the optimum amount for a video?
- Is a good range of basic level tags, that will have higher agreement on terms, more useful for describing and re-finding a video than a broader range of general and more specific tags that are likely to be agreed on by a minority of users?
- Can the gameplay of a game affect the type of tag entered?