A User Study of Using Folksonomic Tag Clouds as an Aid to Book Indexing
Date Issued
2012
Date
2012
Author(s)
Liang, Wen-Hsin
Abstract
The purpose of the study is to examine whether the users’ selection of tags is affected by the font size of the tags in a visual interface, and to examine whether TF-IDF weight based tag size visualization is more conducive to the quality of the tags they choose.
A book-tagging experiment was conducted with Latin square design where the participants were asked to use alternately two tag cloud interface to tag sixteen books, one without visualization, the other vary the size to tags based on their TF-IDF weight Thirty-six participants who had basic familiarity of these books took part in the experiment. After tagging the books, they were also asked to rank the importance of the tags they had assigned for each book. Two professional librarians were asked to tag and rank the same set of books, the result of which served as the benchmark for comparing the quality of the tags selected by participants.
The results showed a difference in the selected tags between visualization and non-visualization interfaces in terms of tag concentration. Tags selected using the visualization showed significant more uneven distribution as measured by Gini index and entropy. A correlation of tag size and tag selection was found where visualization was present, which indicated the impact of varying tag font size on the participants’ selection. A difference in the quality of the tags selected was also found. Using tags selected by librarians as quality criteria to evaluate the quality of users’ selected tags in two different groups, we found a significantly higher similarity between the tags selected by the librarians and the participants using the visualization interface. Furthermore, the results also showed the effect of visualization was over and above the effect of users’ own knowledge.
Subjects
Visual interfaces
Tag cloud
Folksonomy
Quality of tags
Experimental methods
Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF)
Type
thesis
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