Operation waffles: expressive tagging on Scratch

Studies on collaborative tagging systems have focused on the benefits of tagging for Personal Information Management and for retrieval. While these effects are well documented, we pose a different hypothesis: that tagging can be used as a communicative technology, and that has the capability to coordinate and create experiences across groups of users. In this paper, we describe the way youth engage in the practice of tagging on the Scratch website, an online community for sharing videogames and animation. We examine tag distribution data and find evidence to support the prevalence of “altruistic” and “expressive” tagging practice. We then propose a framework for examining tagging as a communicative and creative practice of classification.