Are we sure we need hierarchies?
As Shirky famously argued, ontologies are overrated. We could, instead, build a system that goes from the particular to the general:
- "A snippet of text"
refers toatag. - A
tagrefers toanothertag.
That’s it. There’s no other level. You can build levels concatenating tags. Let’s explore some use cases.
Use case 1: generalizing/making hierarchies
The researcher is tagging snippets that refer to widgets and gadgets. At some point, she realizes that widgets and gadgets have someting in common, they are both expressions of technology. She creates a tag technology, and refers to it the widgets and the gadgets tags. Now we have a tag that both widgets and gadgets refer to – in this sense, a meta-tag. But in fact, it is is simply a tag: you could just as well assign snippets directly to technology, if they refer to expressions of technology other than widgets or gadgets. There are no meta-tags, just tags and relationships.
Use case 2: branching out
The researcher finds out that there are several snippets about technology that all refer to the same expression of tech: robots. She creates a robots tag, and refers it back to technology. This way, the coding file knows that all snippets coded widgets, gadgets or robots all inherit technology.
Use case 3: collapsing
The researcher decides that, after all, there is really no difference between how respondents treat widgets and gadgets. Distinguishing the two does not really add any explanatory power to the study. So, she merges widgets, gadgets and technology, and deletes the first two tags. At this point, our tags branch consists of technology and a subset of it, robots.
Does this make sense?