ArticleRead (8) :Information as sign: semiotics and information science

Information as sign: semiotics and information science, By Douglas Raber & John M. Budd, Journal of Documentation, 2003, 59, 5, pp.507-522

By the definition of Linguistic Sign from Fernand de Saussure (1959), Raber and Budd (2003) try to define information in two parts as “Text” and “Content” in parallel with Saussure’s sign (Signifier and Signified). Table 1 shows how Raber and Budd taking information as Saussure’s linguistic Sign. Table 2 illustrates why semiotics can be applied in information science.

Table 1: Information as Saussure’s Sign

Table 2: Information Science and Semiotics

Note: This review was mainly completed as a homework while taking the Humanity Informatics Class lectured by Professor Ching-Chun Hsieh in Jan. 2007.

ArticleRead (6): The folksonomy tag cloud: when is it useful?

The folksonomy tag cloud: when is it useful? By James Sinclair and Michael Cardew-Hall ,Journal of Information Science 2008 34: 15-29

With the assumption of folksonomy systems affecting user perceptions and patterns, it is interesting to see what empirically can be found from a user interface point to see how tag cloud impact users in information exploration. Sinclair and Cardew-Hall in this paper clearly conclude their findings in small-scale enterprise context, which supports arguments of Mathes (2004) and Brooks & Montanex (2006), that the usability of tag cloud is a social navigation aid tool when broad, general or vague information exploration is taken up. Increasingly, evidences from empirical survey support the function of tagging for broad categorization. [e.g. Noll and Meinel, 2007]

A proper appreciation of this research with which the need to evaluate Tag Cloud in its usability is asserted in its visual summary design, and its ability to serve for non-specific information discovery. Such results are also given weights to a substantial literature reviews of many pro-and-con characteristics of tag clouds. Here, we try to summarize both ends in usability and sociability analysis in the table below.


A very interesting section of this article is that: only 2 out of 89 participants with high level computer background in their experiment are familiar with the tagging mechanism. This percentage is surprisingly low while comparing to the overview that almost one third of online American users have used tagging mechanisms. Out of most curiosity is that since this study is a research on user patterns and perception, there is a missing data analysis to undertake. While the study has concluded that the cost of a query is reduced in the tag cloud scenario (compared with more typing efforts in search box), should the mean tags tagged per article of each participant need to be considered as one of the factors in the cost analysis? Indeed, this remains a question to explore.