Entries tagged with tags

Entry tags:

FAQ Update: Tagging

Because the tag project is dragging on (in the fantasy world in my head, we would have been done by now!), and because I can't tell how long it's ultimately going to take, I've updated the FAQ to reflect the current situation.

( Where are...? Who does...? How do I...? )
I do apologize for not having updated it earlier. If you catch something else that needs updating, let me know.

As far as where we are in the tag project...

The bulk of the author tags have been moved. We haven't yet decided how to make sure that all new posts get indexed over there. One possibility we threw out was to ask for monthly volunteers: people willing to take all the new posts made in a month and add them to the delicious account. (Or we could do less than a month, if a month seems unreasonable or if we get a traffic surge like we did during RaceFail09. Basically, we do not wish to break our volunteers!) What do y'all think? Other suggestions?
oyceter is doing behind-the-scenes work right now on Phase Two, where we take on the nationality, ethnicity, geography, and related tags. (Some of the previous discussions about that: here, here, and here. And yes, we've been plodding away at this for a long while now. Even with y'all pitching in and doing the bulk of the labor, we've been having trouble getting the planning and administrative side of it done.) I'll leave oyceter to explain more about that once she's a little farther along with it.

...and that's what I've got. If you've got suggestions for doing maintenance on Delicious (or want to volunteer for a month's shift!), or otherwise have comments, suggestions, corrections, or questions, let us know. :-)

Entry tags:

mod posts,
tags

Author Tags, Still

So, back in February (where does the time go!? no, wait, I know: grad school) we began porting all the author tags over to Delicious: long story short, there are many, many POC authors reviewed on this comm, far more than the LJ tag system can accommodate. (I consider this a good problem to have, frankly.) Ultimately, this is only the first phase of a two-phase project: first, move author/illustrator/editor/translator tags off of LJ; second, neaten/re-organize/rethink the race/ethnicity/country tags and cross-reference them in both places (while simultaneously locking down creation of new tags to mods, so that there's some hope of them staying neatened/reorganized). In that second phase we will also likely look at the genre/subject tags again.

Anyway, re Phase I, Move Author Tags to Delicious: many volunteers stepped up, and between them, cross-referenced some 885 posts onto Delicious. Yay! Many thanks to

anitabuchan,

coraa,

idella,

kyuuketsukirui,

ruke,

rushthatspeaks,

sumofparts,

sweet_adelheid, and

zeborahnz!

However, Phase I is not yet complete: as sometimes happens, not everyone was able to complete the posts they initially signed up to do, so there are still some 200+ posts that need to be cross-referenced onto Delicious.

Which means that I'm asking for volunteers again. (There may be a day in which I post about tags and do not ask for volunteers, but that day is not today.)

If you're willing to put in some time updating the delicious account, and thereby helping us finish Phase I on this project, please drop a comment here with a way for me to reach you via email, and I'll send you directions. If you don't want to leave an email address in the comments, drop it to me by private message. I'm not asking for a minimum commitment at this point: I basically just need this finished, and am asking people to sign up for whatever they're comfortable doing.

Anyone out there willing to help finish up moving the author tags to Delicious?

Entry tags:

mod posts,
tags

Tag Project, Still Looking for Volunteers

I know that the internet is lightly populated on the weekends, so I wanted to bring this to your attention for those who missed it: Let's Talk About Tagging.

This weekend, we started the push to move all author tags over to delicious, where we also started creating the by.poster tags that some of you had asked for. Roughly a thousand posts need to be indexed on delicious; I currently have commitments from volunteers to do 750 posts. They've made an excellent start, too -- over the course of the weekend, they've finished about three hundred posts. (Yay!)

If you'd like to help, we still need volunteers. Two people finished their commitments and offered to take on more, but that still leaves us short of the full thousand. More details are in the other post; sign up here or there.

Entry tags:

mod posts,
tags

So, Let's Talk About Tags

So many of you know that we've been butting up against LJ's tag-limit for a while now (1000 tags for a free community), and that the long-term tag-management plan is to port all the author tags over to the 50books_PoC Delicious account. (That's the first step. After that's done, we'll try to rope the race/ethnicity/nationality/geography tags into some sort of order. But for this phase of the project, I'm just talking about author tags.)

The rest of this post is divided into two parts:

How should I tag my posts?
Can I volunteer to help move the author tags to delicious?

Part the first: How should I tag my posts?

Don't bother with the author / editor / translator tags -- we're just going to be deleting them all out anyway, as we move them over to delicious. Do make it clear in the post what the author's name is.
Please copy your proposed race/ethnicity/nationality/geography/whatever tags into the body of the post, at the very end, something like I've done here. If you don't know that level of detail, that's fine. However, there is often stuff that's obvious to you, the reader of the book, that is not obvious to us, the maintainers of the tags, which is why it's nice if you include that info in an easy-to-find-spot in the post. Sorting out the race/ethnicity/nationality/geography tags later on will be easier for us if we're not having to research all these authors.

The other reason that I want you putting this info into the post is because some of it is too granular to live on LJ's tag system -- we've only got a thousand tags at our disposal here. At the moment, when someone uses tags that are just too finely-divided for LJ (like what city or state the book is set in, or the narrow subject matter), we're having to delete them out again because there isn't space to go that fine. Unfortunately, when we delete them out, if that info isn't in the post, too, it's gone forever. So please duplicate your tags at the end of the post.
Do not use the "(delicious)" tag -- that's for the volunteer-team-to-be only. We're using that tag to keep track of where we are as we're cataloging posts over on delicious.

...and there are probably other questions you have, but which I didn't think to answer. Let me know.

Part the second: Can I volunteer to help move the tags to delicious?

Yes, please! Please, please, yes!

Some of you said a while back that you'd be willing to help, but we were still at the point of figuring out what we wanted to do, and how to do it. Now we're ready for the additional hands/fingers/however-you-manipulate-the-internets.

Right now we've got roughly a thousand posts that need to be catalogued on delicious. I've done eighty or so, mostly just getting a feel for the task. I've got step-by-step instructions that I'll send you if you volunteer. (In short: add the post to delicious; update delicious tags; update LJ tags.) It goes quickly enough once you've got the rhythm, but like most clerical work, it does tend to run toward the persnickety-fiddly side.

I was thinking that I'd assign posts to volunteers by month, but then I took a closer look at the comm history...

( Any guesses as to when RaceFail happened? )
Yeah. Unless any of you are looking at those RaceFail months and clamoring for the opportunity to take them on, I'll divide them into smaller sections.

My druther is to have ten-ish volunteers who are willing to do a hundred posts each, but I'm happy to take whatever offers of help I get. (And if you want to do more, I won't say no! I'm suggesting 100 posts per person only because I'd rather not burn anyone out.)

If you want to volunteer, please give me an indication of how much you're willing to take on, as well as a way for me to reach you by email. ETA: If you don't want to leave a comment with your email, you can get it to me by LJ message.

...and, that's what I've got.

So, does anyone want to help move the author tags over to delicious?

Entry tags:

FAQ and Tags Update

Heya, it's your friendly neighborhood mod here. Two notes:

As many of you have noticed, we've been battling the tag limit for a while, but we haven't gotten the new tagging scheme up and running yet. Right now, I'm working on easing things up a bit by porting author tags over to delicious. Eventually all author tags will be over there, but for some intermediate period we'll have a situation where some author tags are here and some are there. If you can't find an author tag that you're sure ought to exist (or if some of the posts for that tag seem to be missing from the tag), pop over to delicious and look under the "authors" tag bundle. It should be over there. (Also, the (delicious) tag that some of you may have noticed? The intent is for it to be used during the transition, to help us keep track of what we're doing -- when we finish, we'll get rid of it. Please don't add or remove that tag to posts, unless you are working on the tag-portage project.)

And yes, as soon as we get the details sorted out, we will be asking for help in porting things over. Believe me, I am already very much looking forward to the extra hands.
I'm going to modify the spoiler-code listed in the FAQ so that it has better accessibility for people who use screenreaders. The idea and execution is described here, but the basic idea is to bridge the spoiler with a "skip this spoiler" hyperlink. Like so:
(skip spoiler)
This should be skippable even when one is using a screenreader. If it's a long spoiler you'll get one border around the entire block of text, instead of overlapping borders around each individual line of text. Dunno about you, but that had been bugging me.

If this doesn't render properly on your browser, let me know, and I'll see what I can do to fix it.

If you want to try it out in the comments, here's the spoiler code:
```
(<a title="Skip this Spoiler" href="#skip.firstspoiler">skip spoiler</a>)
<div title="This is a spoiler. Highlight to read." style="color:#666; 
background-color:#666; border:2px red solid"> SPOILER TEXT GOES HERE
</div> <a name="skip.firstspoiler"></a>
```
If you have more than one spoiler, just change "skip.firstspoiler" to "skip.secondspoiler" (change both instances!) as appropriate.

Also, because I know that big block of code can be unpleasant for some, I'll add instructions to the FAQ for rot-13. (Unless anyone has a good reason to not use rot-13?) V zlfrys unir n sbaqarff sbe byq-fxbby zrgubqf; ohg gura, V'z yvxr gung. (Gung gbgnyyl jnfa'g jbegu hapvcurevat, jnf vg? Fbeel.)

ETA: It appears that using rot-13 well with screen-readers should have similar "jump past this spoiler" HTML around it, which doesn't make it much/any simpler to implement.

Entry tags:

mod posts,
tags

More on tagging

Hi all!

After mod discussion and comments here and here, we've decided on the following:

We will be moving author tags completely off of LJ and onto our Delicious. We will also be creating poster tags and keeping those solely on Delicious as well. All other tags will be on both LJ and Delicious, and we apologize for the inconvenience of having some tags only on Delicious. Our rationale behind it was that the number of author tags is the largest (630 out of 1000, which does not include white author/illustrator/editor tags, the editor tags, or the illustrator tags) and is the category likely to grow the most. We also anticipate poster tags taking up a fair amount of space, ergo, they are Delicious-only as well.

I'll be redoing the tag system on both LJ and Delicious so we have more consistent tags, as opposed to "sff," "fantasy," sci-fi/fantasy" and etc. Going forward, only mods will be able to create new tags on LJ (everyone can still decide what tags to put on their own posts). We'll have a "needs new tag" tag (exact wording TBD) for posts that need new tags.

The new tag system will be documented to make volunteer work easier! Thank you to the people who volunteered to help; I'll probably be getting in touch with people once there's a system in place.

ETA: Apologies for the confusion! No one needs to know Delicious for this; the mods will be tagging all posts for Delicious. So all posters here will need to do is tag their posts as normal (albeit without author or poster tags), and the mods will import the posts into Delicious.

I have not yet decided (suggestions very welcome!):

What categories to use for tags. Right now, the categories I have in mind are author/illustrator/editor (Delicious only), poster (Delicious only), country, race, ethnicity, tribal affiliation, religion, topic, genre, original language. None of the tags are mandatory, so as to avoid situations in which we are policing identity.

What to do with overlapping categories, such as "Chinese American" or overlaps within categories, such as "Chinese/Japanese." For Delicious, you can narrow down searches within tags, so if you're specifically looking for Black Caribbean writers, you can first click "Black" then add "Caribbean" to narrow down results. LJ doesn't allow this functionality, so we can either a) not include it or b) create tags for it.

If it matters if author info and book info don't match. For example, if I am looking for books set in China vs. books by people from China. Currently we have tags like "women writers" or "Black writers" on LJ; do people find this useful?

More that will undoubtedly come up as I try to figure things out!

I also wanted to say that I know the act of categorizing in and of itself is political, and that hopefully the tradeoffs being made for ease of use are worth putting things in buckets. But I am not certain it is overall or in specific cases, so comments re: that are particularly welcome.

Entry tags:

mod posts,
tags

Tagging poll

Hey all,

So we're still working out how to revamp the current tagging system, especially since we've run against the 1000-tag limit twice in about two months.

From comments here, it seems as though most people use the author tags, and a few people would like tags with even more granularity (i.e. tags to find entries by who posted).

However, given LJ's tag limit, it doesn't seem feasible to keep all the tags on LJ, unless we cut down on what we tag. Currently, the author tags comprise of about 500+ tags, with the rest being a mish-mash of genre, race, ethnicity, nationality, and subject.

We've also been thinking of using our Delicious to tag posts on the comm and using a combination of Delicious + LJ. The combination would be something like keeping all the author tags on LJ and then putting tags for other things on Delicious.

A geeky table with benefits and downsides!

	LiveJournal	Delicious + LJ combination
Benefits	All in one place Users can tag their own entries We know how it works	No limit on tags Ability to search on a combination of tags (ex. find all the entries on books set in India posted by sanguinity) Some tags still viewable from LJ
Downsides	Limit to number of tags, meaning we will have to not tag certain things No ability to narrow down searches	Hard to keep coordinated Putting the tags solely on Delicous means fewer people will see them More work for mods

[Poll #1429226]

Entry tags:

Tagging

Or: in which I actually start making good on my word to my fellow co-mods and take a stab at organizing tags

First, how do you guys use the tags? Do you use the tags?

deepad posted a while ago asking how people tagged authors of color on LibraryThing, Shelfari, and GoodReads. I'd also love any brainstorming here for tags for the community, and I'll create a poll out of the options people generate later. Some options: authors of color, authors: poc, a: poc, poc author, a: chromatic, etc. I'll follow the same schema for editors and illustrators as well. There's further discussion here as well.

I noticed that the comm has many race tags and then "[race] writers" tags. Is it helpful for people to have both? I figured having both means you can pick up a book about Japanese and Native American people and know that the author is Japanese. If it is helpful, I'd like to follow whatever schema we decide for the first question (ex. authors of color: black, authors: black, a: black, black author, etc.). Also, how granular would people like this to be? Ex. just author: asian or author: asian + author: japanese?

I'm going to get rid of hyphenated races and go with unhyphenated (ex. black british instead of black-british) unless people have reasons not to. I'll also be using the "@" symbol for words that switch according to gender (ex. Latin@ instead of Latina/Latino).

Does anyone have opinions on "Asian Pacific Islanders" vs. separating them out? I do not want to exclude Pacific Islanders, but I also want people specifically looking for Pacific Islanders to be able to find them...

Let me know if any of these schemas are problematic! I want the community to be as useful to its members as possible and would love any suggestions or comments.

Entry tags:

mod posts,
tags

FAQ Update: Tags for Non-POC Authors

I just updated the FAQ. Most tweaks are minor, but I added one new question and made a major revision to another. For your convenience, the text of both questions are copied below:

( How can I find out if an author is a person of color? )

( Who tags posts? How do I tag posts? )

Notice, please, the change: we're now tagging POC authors, editors, and illustrators differently from white (co-)authors, editors, and illustrators. This is so that the "a: ", "ed: " and "i: " tags can act as a running list of POC authors, editors, and illustrators, and (hopefully) cut down on confusion about who is or isn't a person of color.

(If you want an action shot, take a look at the tags on this post, which includes one white-edited anthology and a book with a white co-author. [Erm, I could probably have made that far clearer in the reviews themselves.])

Where we need your help: If you've previously posted a book to the comm that has either a white co-author or a white editor, or if you've added a white illustrator to the tags list, would you please edit the tags on that post? I've already made a first pass through the list of editors, but there's no way I can go through that ginormous list of author names and confirm them all manually. So, if you've posted a white co-author, editor, or illustrator to the comm, would you please edit their tags? Or point them out to us, if you need help? Thanks!

And one more thing: a big thank you to everyone who's been conscientiously tagging their posts! It's been looking really good lately, and you've been making my mornings much simpler. :-)