Folksonomy applied to film indexing on the letterboxd platform

Abstract

The emergence and impact of social media platforms have brought new tools for interacting with and organizing information in the digital environment. In this context, Folksonomy stands out for enabling a collaborative and dynamic approach to indexing the most varied content available on the web. The general objective of this work is to investigate how Folksonomy can influence information retrieval on the Letterboxd platform, presenting it as an online social media focused on cinema and cinephiles. It also analyzes how information is described and investigates how tags can contribute to information retrieval. In the methodological procedures, it carries out exploratory, descriptive and bibliographical research of qualitative nature. To investigate how and for what purpose tags are used by Letterboxd users, it simulates searches with the “Brazil” tag, given the growth of Brazilian users on the platform. As a data collection technique, the non-participant observation method was chosen in order to avoid interacting with the search results. It is found that subjectivity and personalization of the tag’s use cause inaccuracy and decentralization in the search results. Finally, it is concluded that there is a need for a method that simultaneously allows the user to have autonomy when assigning their tags and guarantees quality indexing for effective and accurate recovery.