Cultural difference in image tagging

Do people from different cultures tag digital images differently? The current study compared the content of tags for digital images created by two cultural groups: European Americans and Chinese. In line with previous findings on cultural differences in attentional patterns, we found similar cultural differences in the order of the image parts (e.g., foreground or background objects) that people tag. We found that for European Americans, the first tag was more likely assigned to the main objects than that by Chinese; but for Chinese, the first tag was more likely assigned to the overall description or relations between objects in the images. The findings had significant implications for designing cultural-sensitive tools to facilitate the tagging and search process of digital media, as well as for developing data-mining tools that identify user profiles based on their tagging patterns and cultural origins.