All entries for Tuesday 01 November 2005

November 01, 2005

Planning Notes: All 95 philosophy research entries keyword tagged

For the last year I have been carrying out an experiment in using Warwick Blogs as a research and writing tool. The recent introduction of tags, as a replacement for categories, offers some new and very interesting possibilities. So I just spent the last few hours tagging my philosophy entries, 95 of them.

A few of the advantages of tags are:

  1. you can easily invent new tags for each new entry;
  2. you can re-use tags previously used in your own blog, or even in other people's blogs;
  3. for each tag, you have an auto-generated page showing all of the entries containing the tag, for example, see the list for the tag deleuze
  4. the most frequently used tags in a blog are listed in the left hand column, linking to pages that show entries for each of the tags;
  5. a page can be accessed for any combination of tags, for example, deleuze and art
  6. you can get a list of entries that contain one or more tags within a department or the whole of Warwick Blogs, for example, this page shows entries on art
  7. a single entry can have more than one tag, thus allowing it to be categorised in more than one way

This is potentially powerful, especially as people are starting to consistently share tags in an organised way. Expect to see this approach used in teaching in the future, especially as Sitebuilder supports a similar keyword tagging system, and we are writing "thematic navigation" tools that exploit it.

As for my own blog, it may well be the most thoroughly tagged blog yet. For each of the 95 philosophy entries, I added tags that represent the concepts covered, as well as the philosophers and books referenced. So now it is possible for me to see a page that lists all of my entries that relate to the concept extended_cognition
or, you can see a page listing entries about the book germinal_life

My ultimate plan is to take the complete list of concepts used in my philosophy entries, add them to a concept map, organise them with connections, and link them back to the pages that list them in my blog.

If you are interested in this idea, then contact me


Robert O'Toole : 01 Nov 2005 00:42 |  Tags:     |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem