Top of this document
Go directly to navigation
Go directly to page content

Physical Metadata

tag, tagged, taggers, tagees

Classifying objects is no longer a responsibility for a torturous team of meticulous librarians. On the internet, users freely classify each others websites, images and texts by adding tags, which other users can browse and use to find things.

with:

Users can tag URLs ( on del.icio.us ), photographs ( on flickr.com ) soundsamples ( freesound project ) and undoubtedly a myriad of other online objects. Online this creates a open structure of information about information otherwise known as metadata, but what happens offline? How can things in the real world be democratically defined?

Physical MetadataPhysical MetadataPhysical Metadata

The Physical Metadata project attempted introducing tagging into the real world. 55 words were printed on cards (tags, really) and could be attached to real objects in the physical world. More examples of what happened can be seen on www.flickr.com/photos/tags/physicalmetadata.