Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Playing Tag

As many of you know, I am not good at labeling/tagging my posts, and this makes searches a bit difficult. I have therefore been slowly organizing some categories and adding a few tags here and there, but progress this summer has been slow. But I want to reform and become a better tagger in the future and to fix some of my past lapses.

Perhaps you can help me come up with tags that would be most useful for you. I have started using one for posts that discuss interactions between advisers and students, called simply "adviser-student". Other obvious tags are "reviewing" (perhaps with separate categories for papers and proposals?), "teaching", "tenure", "cats". I have taken some inspiration from other blogs, so I have a working list, but it would be most helpful to have direct feedback from people who might actually use these tags in this particular blog.

Please give me suggestions!

17 comments:

  1. a 'VBA' tag could come in handy

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  2. Susan B. Anthony8/11/2010 01:09:00 AM

    How about "feminist whining"? You know, just so those who are convinced you're LOOKING for things to complain about will be able to tell which posts to skip. ;)

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  3. what about 'books'? you and your commenters are full of great suggestions.

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  4. Female post-doc8/11/2010 07:55:00 AM

    "Books" or "Book reviews/commentary"

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  5. I'm a big fan of "over tagging." That's the nice thing about them...you can add lots!

    Some I'd like that would be useful for your content are:
    NSF, grants (or funding?), collaboration, teaching, mentoring, job search, networking, interviewing, diversity (or equity?), employment, ethics, meetings (or conferences?), policy, presentations (or talks?), gradschool, postdoc, faculty

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  6. I think you do a lot of reflecting about the perceptions of scientists and/or academics by "lay" people (undergrads, grade schoolers, your daughter's teachers, your family). Maybe something that captures that? I think these stories are among the most humorous!

    (Of course, a lot of your posts about academic novels are kind of about that, too.)

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  7. you have a few posts about "letters of recommendation" that I look up every once in a while. i usually have to find them through an elaborate google search.

    academic fiction seems to be another topic you write about. and a potential double entendre.

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  8. "dead wood"
    "jerks"/"dealing with jerks"
    "review process"
    "writing"

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  9. I agree that multiple tagging is more useful than categorizing. (I have more tags than posts on my blog currently, though I've only got 55 posts, so that doesn't mean much.)

    Some useful tags for your blog include "sexism", "refereeing", "grants", "advising", "mentoring", "humor", "cats",

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  10. -postdoc

    -job search
    -interviewing
    -CV/resume
    -two body problem

    (Can you tell what's on my mind?)

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  11. Here are a few suggestions for tag categories. I generally think too many categories are probably unnecessary, so staying within 10-15 should be enough (in my opinion).
    There are some obvious catehories, like (1) grant writing, (2) research publication, (3) tenure/promotion

    (4) women in science/academia, (5) diversity.

    (6) Work-family balance

    (7) Academic service

    (8) Academics and
    Professional decorum/interpersonal relationships: dealing with collaborators, students, postdocs

    (9) Teaching

    (10) Job hunting advice

    (11) Family

    (12) Leisure/entertainment/humor

    (13) Cats

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  12. I'd love the two-body posts to be tagged.

    It would be nice to have posts with advice directed to specific time points in a career (grad, postdoc, ass., associate, prof, etc.) tagged. Maybe they aren't all applicable, but I know I've seen posts directed at the "younger" categories, certainly.

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  13. Besides the ones mentioned I also use ones that reflect my tone of the post when I was writing: whining, bitching, reflection, happiness, celebration, contemplation, whatever words suit you best.

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  14. @GMP The way I think about it is that each post is usually only fits in 1-2 "categories" but can may have lots (~10) of "tags."

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  15. You are creating a folksonomy! For a quick overview, see Wikipedia's entries on tagging, folksonomy, taxonomy, and ontology. A reasonably friendly field to explore is information science (library science), which deals with knowledge organization and classification. Talk to a librarian -- there may be general thesauri already out there for bloggers.

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