Why we tag: motivations for annotation in mobile and online media

Why do people tag? Users have mostly avoided annotating media such as photos -- both in desktop and mobile environments -- despite the many potential uses for annotations, including recall and retrieval. We investigate the incentives for annotation in Flickr, a popular web-based photo-sharing system, and ZoneTag, a cameraphone photo capture and annotation tool that uploads images to Flickr. In Flickr, annotation (as textual tags) serves both personal and social purposes, increasing incentives for tagging and resulting in a relatively high number of annotations. ZoneTag, in turn, makes it easier to tag cameraphone photos that are uploaded to Flickr by allowing annotation and suggesting relevant tags immediately after capture. A qualitative study of ZoneTag/Flickr users exposed various tagging patterns and emerging motivations for photo annotation. We offer a taxonomy of motivations for annotation in this system along two dimensions (sociality and function), and explore the various factors that people consider when tagging their photos. Our findings suggest implications for the design of digital photo organization and sharing applications, as well as other applications that incorporate user-based annotation.

[1]  Marc Davis,et al.  Metadata creation system for mobile images , 2004, MobiSys '04.

[2]  Ben Shneiderman,et al.  Direct annotation: a drag-and-drop strategy for labeling photos , 2000, 2000 IEEE Conference on Information Visualization. An International Conference on Computer Visualization and Graphics.

[3]  Abigail Sellen,et al.  Understanding photowork , 2006, CHI.

[4]  John Riedl,et al.  tagging, communities, vocabulary, evolution , 2006, CSCW '06.

[5]  Michael L. Creech,et al.  FotoFile: a consumer multimedia organization and retrieval system , 1999, CHI '99.

[6]  Ben Shneiderman,et al.  Immediate Usability: Kiosk design principles from the CHI 2001 Photo Library , 2003 .

[7]  Marc Davis,et al.  The uses of personal networked digital imaging: an empirical study of cameraphone photos and sharing , 2005, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[8]  Mor Naaman,et al.  From Where to What: Metadata Sharing for Digital Photographs with Geographic Coordinates , 2003, OTM.

[9]  Daisuke Okabe,et al.  Everyday Contexts of Camera Phone Use : Steps Toward Technosocial Ethnographic Frameworks , 2005 .

[10]  Nancy A. Van House.  Interview viz: visualization-assisted photo elicitation , 2006, CHI EA '06.

[11]  Laura A. Dabbish,et al.  Labeling images with a computer game , 2004, AAAI Spring Symposium: Knowledge Collection from Volunteer Contributors.

[12]  Kerry Rodden.  How Do People Organise Their Photographs? , 1999, BCS-IRSG Annual Colloquium on IR Research.

[13]  Abigail Sellen,et al.  The ubiquitous camera: an in-depth study of camera phone use , 2005, IEEE Pervasive Computing.

[14]  Allan Kuchinsky,et al.  Requirements for photoware , 2002, CSCW '02.

[15]  Catherine C. Marshall,et al.  Toward an ecology of hypertext annotation , 1998, HYPERTEXT '98.

[16]  B. Shneiderman,et al.  Motivating Annotation for Personal Digital Photo Libraries : Lowering Barriers While Raising Incentives , 2022 .

[17]  Mor Naaman,et al.  Leveraging context to resolve identity in photo albums , 2005, Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL '05).

[18]  Kerry Rodden,et al.  How do people manage their digital photographs? , 2003, CHI '03.

[19]  Mor Naaman,et al.  HT06, tagging paper, taxonomy, Flickr, academic article, to read , 2006, HYPERTEXT '06.

[20]  Antti Oulasvirta,et al.  Collective creation and sense-making of mobile media , 2006, CHI.

[21]  Ben Shneiderman,et al.  Exploring personal media: A spatial interface supporting user-defined semantic regions , 2006, J. Vis. Lang. Comput..

[22]  Ben Shneiderman,et al.  Motivating Annotation for Digital Photographs: Lowering Barriers While Raising Incentives (2004) , 2005 .

[23]  John Adcock,et al.  Simplifying the Management of Large Photo Collections , 2003, INTERACT.

[24]  Mary Czerwinski,et al.  Semi-Automatic Image Annotation , 2001, INTERACT.

[25]  Bernardo A. Huberman,et al.  The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems , 2005, ArXiv.