Grounding AI the webby way — Taxonomy Boot Camp London 2026 takeaways

https://duncanstephen.net/grounding-ai-the-webby-way-taxonomy-boot-camp-london-2026-takeaways/

So, I've been busily tagging my e-book collection, consolodating similar-but-not-identical tags, classifying stuff as Science Fiction or Fantasy and so on. I mean, like, I have Project Gutenberg books tagged with "Human-alien encounters", changing them to just "Aliens" seems more sensible to me, right?

Pondering the usefulness of not bothering with redundant tagging. For example, if I have Doctor Who e-books, it seems pretty stupid to tag them all with "Time Travel" because I already *know* that, it seems redundant, and makes the non Doctor-Who time travel novels harder to find.

What are your thoughts? How do you go about tagging/keywords if you want to keep your stuff (ebooks) organised? Or are you content with just Author-and-Title?

#Tagging #Keywords #Ebooks

Movement on that prospective Fake News/Pundit RPF AO3 update

The Daily/Colbert tag tree proposal I was working on back in February has gotten some official internal feedback! Including some points I’m happy to incorporate into an updated proposal. (And some I’m still pushing back on. Final version of the rewrite TBD.)

Notes about some changes I’m personally on board with, in case anyone’s curious…

There aren’t any works left in the Full Frontal fandom tag, and AO3’s official policy is “don’t include 0-use tags in any tag trees.” So that’s out of the proposal. Unless somebody reading this post has a Sam Bee fic they can crosspost real quick…? (I checked my own Sam-involving fanworks, but they’re all set before Full Frontal started airing (2016), so it wouldn’t feel honest to tag that as a fandom.)

We’re probably keeping the current “2 metatags with overlapping subtags” structure, where the Pundit/Journalist RPF metatag and Fake News metatag (however it gets renamed) aren’t directly related, they just have shared custody of the separate Fake News RPF subtag (however that gets renamed).

Honestly, I thought a simplified structure was more likely to get approved! But if the weird clunky one will go over better, I’m happy to stick with it.

The only specific issue with “Pundit & Broadcast Journalism RPF (US)” is, it’s recommended for a rename to lose the “US” at the end. If you go through the works in the tag, you can see that the current usage includes RPF about non-US people, so this seems reasonable to me.

There’s a fandom tag for Judge John Hodgman (the podcast), currently synned to Fake News RPF. It’s a separate show, it deserves its own distinct fandom tag. After spotting that, I added it to the original proposal with “make it a subtag of the Fake News metatag” — but I wasn’t deeply invested in that, so now I’ll be asking for “just make it, don’t subtag it anywhere” instead.

I need to make a clearer argument for how “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (TV)” is connected to the TDS/TCR lineage. It’s not like John Hodgman’s podcast — it has substantial links beyond just “it’s hosted by a comedian who was on TDS at some point”! But I can understand how that’s not immediately obvious from outside the fandom.

I went looking on the Late Show’s Youtube channel for clips that have explicit continuity with The Colbert Report, and here’s what I’ve found:

• 2016, the reveal that character!Colbert has retired to a cabin, with also-temporarily-retired Jon Stewart. (Shoutout to the multiple people who messaged me when this aired, to make sure I knew my OTP was living together.)
• 2016, “The Wørd” (Trumpiness) explicitly performed as the TCR character. From the description: “Sensing that his timeless wisdom is needed at The Late Show, the character “Stephen Colbert” rides into the Ed Sullivan Theater in a blaze of glory”
• 2016-2017, multi-part “The WERD” playlist, featuring host!Colbert interacting with character!Colbert. The running gag is “this is totally different from the classic Colbert Report segment The Wørd, because we’ve changed the bare minimum necessary to appease the Comedy Central lawyers.”
• 2025, “The Wørd” (Shhhhhh!), one more segment that’s explicitly the TCR character: “Stephen Colbert has appointed Stephen Colbert, former host of “The Colbert Report,” as ombudsman to ensure that the final season of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” remains free from liberal bias.”

Anybody remember more of these? I swear the God Machine showed up at some point, but a few quick searches haven’t turned up that clip.

…Also, when it comes to how users actually tag their works on AO3, 55/80 current works in the LSSC tag are cross-tagged with at least one fandom tag from the Fake News tree. (The other tag tree it should arguably be added to is, subtag it to Late Night Host RPF — which I do agree with — but that fandom is only cross-tagged on 18/80 works.)

Fandom-dropping progress, May 15 report

Down to 875 fandoms.

Only 30 have any tags to wrangle. (And, listen, some of these are the exact same tags-to-wrangle as last month — held up by issues like “they’re part of a crossover, and the other fandom they should be sent to isn’t canonized yet.”)

Finished that second A-to-Z sweep, dropping “all the Korean/Chinese/Japanese webtoons where I’m not caught up with canon.” And now I’m working on a third, dropping “English-language webcomics with only 1 fic, which was posted more than a year ago.”

The Axe Cop tag had its first fanfic in 2011, and the second was in 2025, so you can never just assume a fandom is too inactive to ever get a fic again. But at least with these comics, I feel confident about “this fandom won’t suddenly get a ton of new tags, and suffer from not having a wrangler paying attention.”

AMT updates: No responses yet to the Fake News tree proposal. And there’s a couple writers who apparently decided just this past month “time to back up my 20-year-old TCR fics on AO3,” so I’m feeling extra-wistful that they didn’t have updated tags available to work with.

To be clear, it’s not like the whole process is frozen: other AMT requests are getting approved. (The new metatag for A:TLA & Related Fandoms went live the other day.) Might just not be my lucky month.