Ranking (part 1): Intro and overview – plus some remarks about this blog
There is hardly a week without a new twist in the development of Nico Nico Douga. But even said that, the last weeks were particularly exciting for us at the metadata project. Niwango, the company behind Nico Nico Douga, re-organised its ranking system – only to then face a wave of protest by the Nico Chuu, which forced them to change the system again. For us at the metadata project, ranking is a crucial part of our research. Rankings are a form of metadata, or better, a form, how metadata is organised and fed back to the users – with high effect on usage and production. It partly decides about the success or failure of a platform, and it is a central area of metadata power.
The re-organisation of Nico Nico Douga’s ranking system provides an opportunity to flash out some ideas about a theory of lists and rankings. This turned out to be an ambitious project, and the draft for the post got longer and longer and longer and longer. So I decided to slice up the draft post into parts – 19, to be precise-, and give in this Part 1 only an overview of what is to come. In the following post (part 2), I will describe the recent changes on Nico Nico Douga in more detail. Then I will take a step back and discuss lists and rankings as such. I start with an overview about some of the recent media theoretical literature on lists and rankings on the internet. My first question is, why they draw still so little attention (part 3). From this, I want to dive deeper into a rather abstract theory of rankings and lists.
From this, I want to dive deeper into a rather abstract theory of rankings and lists. For this purpose, I develop an idea of assemblage (part 4). This non-Deleuzian version of a theory of assemblage will provide the base for all following concepts. Next I will look at what differentiates lists from other forms of assemblage (part 5); describe forms of randomness in lists (part 6); tackle the difficult, as mathematical, problem of the potential of list (part 7); look into more complex forms of lists, especially forked lists (part 8), and into the relationship of list and text (part 9), The almost exclusively abstract parts of this series of posts will end with a concept of rankings as one form of list (part 10).
Based on these rather strenuous theoretical ramblings, I will work myself slowly back into more technical and less abstract realms: I will look at computer-based lists and rankings (part 11); the five forms of temporality of lists and rankings (part 12); internet-based rankings (part 13); video community rankings (part 14); Nico Nico Douga’s ranking (part 15), and other forms of lists that you can find on Nico Nico Douga (part 16). Before I can once more return to the recent changes on Nico Nico Douga and give my own opinion on this hotly debated topic (part 17), I want to look at the relation of television to lists and rankings (part 18). I will end this series of posts with a summary that will relate the overall argument to the approach of the metadata project in general (part 19).
19 posts, all devoted to one topic, and organised in a continuous argument, will change this blog. For a while, the topics ranking and list will remain pretty dominant. Kuan, who works at the moment as an intern in the project, plans to post during the same period some other texts around the question he has been working on recently. Meanwhile, there are still much more posts to be written about the empirical data: Especially the remaining posts about the conversations that I had I May and June in Japan. I will keep on posting them, in chronological order. But it will be autumn when I have finally posted all of these. Sometimes, writing has its own laws.
