Life and Dissertation
Posted on: August 12, 2006
Well I haven’t posted for a while mainly due to the fact that I am getting married in a month and so my life has been uber hectic. Last minute problems keep popping up that need immediate attention. Even though I am currently in LA I am getting married back in Bloomington at the Fourwinds Resort and Marina. I really hope I can come back to IU to teach once I am done with my degree here, I really love B-town.
Speaking of degrees, I started my dissertation a year early (wohoo!). I seriously want to finish ASAP :) This summer I spent 2 months writing an NSF grant to fund my work. Grant writing is certainly an experience, even if not a pleasant one. Here is a quick synopsis of what my work will be about:
Conduct an exploratory study of tagging and bookmarking activities among users of a popular social-bookmarking web site (http://del.icio.us/), to understand how these activities generate emergent, collaborative schemes for classifying information (such as collective tagging or folksonomies) that manifest the participants’ collective or social sense of the relevance of information.
Basically, I am going to argue that information filtering and relevance perception is no longer just an individual cognitive process, but a social process as well.
Allaland 
September 21, 2006 at 10:43 am
del.icio.us has totally changed the way I work as a librarian and how I navigate the web. There is such a wealth of knowledge by socially bookmarking to take advantage of. I wonder if we could some how quanitify all the time saved when users search on del.icio.us. Or the collective time spent to build a really great folksonomy of a particular topic. hmmm??? Your research sounds great!
I came across your blog from the UCLA PhD Student profile page to gain some sense of the types of research students are doing. I’m also applying in the Fall. If you have any pointers I’d love to hear them.