What is a folksonomy, and what is its relation to food?

The term has most commonly been connected to online "tagging" or "social bookmarking" information with popular terminology agreed upon by a group of users - similar to "keywords" but the keywords are chosen by anyone rather than a subject expert.

Food and foodways have always had a folksonomatic language, the word "burrito" may summon up the image of a giant 5-pound heap of rice, beans, meat, cheese, salsa, and guacamole rolled into a massive tortilla wrapped log to a Californian, an exotic mexican theme wrap to a New Englander, a $0.99 special on the Taco Bell menu to a Canadian, or an American invention to a Mexican. In the discourse of food - common names change frequently, and it is very difficult to create an offical food language.

Food is a subject ripe for tagging - so many connections are built and discovered as this area evolves. A recipe for "Granny Steinman's Potato Pancakes" could be tagged as: Potato, Recipe, American, Comfort Food, Hannukah, Jewish, Traditional, ...<the list could on and on - feel free to add to it>

A user can "tag" a website, newspaper article, photo, recipe with as many or few descriptors as the user see fit. Other users can use the same tags or add new tags to the object. All these tags will produce searchable paths to the item you saved and relationships will grow and develop between all the items sharing the same tagged phrase.

Keeping true to the purpose of this assignment, I have collected a couple articles regarding the subject of folksonomies and food. It is an area I hope to expand upon in the future...

Articles

Jacobson, J. J. "Subject Access for a Culinary Collection: Experiments at the Longone Center for American Culinary Research." Journal of Agricultural & Food Information 7.2 (2006): 35-55.

• A wonderful exploration into the challenges of cataloging a specialized culinary library.

Pink, Daniel H. "Folksonomy." The New York Times December 11 2005, sec. 6; Magazine: 69.

• Interesting to see an article from 2005 noting the emergence of tagging as a new popular form of organizing information (the library references to Dewey are of sidenote interest as this is a library school project).

An explanation from del.ici.ous about "tagging" and how it can be utilized