When I
was a young French teacher, I used to put big signs on all the objects
in our classroom (which was actually an old farmhouse) with their
French names—la table, le cahier, la chaise, le mur, la peinture, le
chat (the cat didn’t like it very much!). I was reminded of this
practice when I stumbled upon a similar real-world tagging phenomenon
that is cropping up in odd places around the world. It’s a form of
mobile tagging, using Semapedia and QR Codes.
Semapedia is a research site that lets people create two-dimensional
bar codes for physical objects, paste a label with the code on the
objects, and link those objects to a Wikipedia
article. QR codes (which stands for Quick Response) are the specific 2D
bar codes that people seem to have gravitated towards. A QR Code is a
matrix code created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. While
the patent is held by Denso-Wave, the company encourages broad usage.
QR codes were originally used in Japan for tracking automobile parts.
But they soon began to be used by advertisers who placed them on
posters and products in order to provide a quick link to a specific
promotion via customers’ mobile phones.
Citizen-Tagging for Fun and Edification
Now, all over the world, people are pasting labels with 2-dimensional
bar codes on them onto buildings and objects of all kinds. The purpose
of these tags is to provide a link to a relevant Wikipedia article.
It’s a citizen-led, guerrilla approach to linking objects in the
physical world to useful context and information in the virtual world.
These tags are turning up on stores, museums, paintings, ATM machines,
bridges, street corners, parks, records, books, and other types of
merchandise. (I found a tag on a carton of San Pelligrino bottled water
and another tag on a shelf with Perrier.) If you have a mobile phone
with the right software installed, you can point your phone’s camera at
the bar code, and the code will be converted into a mobile-URL link to
the Wikipedia article about that object. If you take a photograph of
the object and upload it to Flickr and add your geographic coordinates,
it will also appear on a map which is maintained at Semapedia.org.
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