Emily Horning gave an introduction to social bookmarking. Demonstrating del.icio.us, she pointed out misspellings and tag inconsistency. She showed citeulike.org and demonstrated PennTags where the scope of the sites bookmarked is more focused. However, I’m still not sure what distinguishes the user experience on these sites from other social bookmarking sites.

Jen Pollock from the Yale Center for British Art then showed a del.icio.us project she’s working on while auditing Tim Barringer’s History of Art class HSAR305 - London: Capital of the 19th Century. The students jump to del.icio.us through a link in Classes*v2. The students in the class all login using the same account to add their bookmarks and the tagging structure is evolving. Ms. Pollock prefers showing the tags as a tag cloud because of the way it visually represents popular tags.

Prof. Barringer expressed how interesting the process has been approaching the technology as a novice. He likened his students to a Star Trek Borg collective fanning out across the Internet finding resources. His hunch is that the students’ time spent studying the online artwork (accessible through the bookmarks) has resulted in students spending more time with the actual physical collections here at Yale. Barringer theorized that the familiarity students gain with exposure to works of art online motivates them more to the real thing. Pollock reiterated that saying that she’s found that it whets students’ appetite to get into the study rooms at the YCBA.

Barringer went on to suggest that the focused pooling of resources in del.icio.us has extended the canon of 19th Century art for his students to encompass more works by British artists. He quipped that if Gardner’s “Art Through the Ages” were your only source, you’d think the only art to come out of the 19th Century was French. The abundant links to sources focusing on 19th Century British art that has been contributed by students has helped to redress that bias.