StoryTags: once upon a time, there was a photo

Abstract

With the growing volume of digital information users must deal with, management and retrieval tasks have become increasingly problematic. A popular way to help users organize their information is tagging, as is the case in web sites such as flickr, delicious or youtube. Unlike traditional hierarchically-based organization principles, tagging is less strict and easier to employ. However, it is not without its own problems. Low tag reuse is just one of several issues that might hinder retrieval of a document or photo at a later time. We propose that narratives can provide a better way of tagging photos. Describing a photo by telling a story about it may yield more and better tags, as information in stories is organized as a structured, coherent whole. We present a prototype web application, StoryTags, that allows users to tell stories to tag their photos, and then to use those stories to retrieve them.