Coding not Tagging

I had an interesting moment yesterday when starting to explain how coding* works in qualitative research.  I was thinking about the easiest way to explain it to a layperson and realised...

All it is is tagging. Standard web2 tagging.

Odd that I had never conceived of the two as linked before.  It is blindingly obvious.

I've been participating in the Tags Networks Narrative in my *cough* spare time so I've noticed it even more.  TNN is a "unique speculative project exploring the potential for collaborative keyword tagging (folksonomy) in narrative research."  It is looking at tagging as a form of communication, folksonomy as an emergent knowledge network and narrative as a common ground.

By happy coincidence I have been assigned to the 'blue group' - see more on the project weblog.

(I am curious to hear more about the findings from our 'adventures in tagging' at the project seminar in June.)

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* Not programming.

Comments

[Bruce Mason]

Ah, I think this is a tricky issue and quite a slippery one to boot. One of the things I have been looking at - coming from a qual background myself - is tagging vs coding. At the moment web2.0 tagging is really a classificatory tool for units of content; more akin to categorising a whole interview (for example) rather than parts of it.

If one were to try to code this blog entry, tagging would be problematic because you're essentially looking at tagging "micro content". For example, one possible code might be "auto-generated content" (handy if you're doing some sort of actor-network analysis) or "who said what" types of codes (e.g. this comment might be coded as "comment" rather than blog entry and "Bruce Mason" in case I commented elsewhere).

Thing is, whenever I mention tagging to anyone in qual res, their first port of call is "ah, coding". In as much as tagging and coding are both instances of data mark-up then they're related but equating tagging with coding risks eliding some of the key differences.

That said, I'm still working some of this out and am likely to completely change my mind on a whim.