How Do They Tag? Senior Adults’ Tagging Behavior in Cultural Heritage Information

This paper addresses the issue of social tagging, especially how the elderly give tags in digital resources. The connection between mental models and the principles of the elderly’s tagging behavior is made. The research method used were two folds. First, two rounds of revised Delphi method were used to obtain the consensus of how the elderly provides tags after viewing a 10-min YouTube clip regarding cultural heritage information. The research team conducted in-depth interviews with 20 elderly citizens who are over 55 years old and are residents in northern Taipei, Taiwan. Each participant was interviewed for about 30 min. After interview sessions, the researcher asked each participant to draw a fishbone diagram with the purpose of grouping in more detailed manner the tags and sub-tags generated from interviews. The analysis of the interview and fishbone diagrams showed that the types of tags the elderly considered fall into three categories: concrete objects, emotion aspects, personal memory and related experience. In addition, the prompts the elderly considered when giving tags are based on explicit texts, buildings, and key people shown in the film. Lastly, the factors the elderly considered when giving tags are mainly because of repeated themes, concrete objects, as well as personal and communal memory from the past experience.