It may seem unreasonable to distinguish the Great Wanderings (Troy toKalypso's island) from the Homecoming (Kalypso's island to Ithaka). The reasonfor the distinction is Homer's way of recounting these two stages. The GreatWanderings are told by Odysseus in the first person; the Homecoming by thepoet in his own person. This makes a great difference. For instance, whenOdysseus is made to report divine intervention unseen by him, he has to find aplausible explanation (xii.389-390); when the poet tells the story in his ownperson, he can do as he pleases. Thus the change of technique, if nothing else,puts the two stages of wandering on different levels.

Perhaps the best way to understand the weird things that people do with folksonomy tags is to appeal, not to information science, but to narratology, the study of narrative structures. Traditional narratology recognizes four basic forms of narrative structure: romance, in which we fight against the constraints of the universe and overcome those constraints; tragedy, in which we fight against the constraints of the universe and succumb to those constraints; comedy, in which we fight against the constraints of the universe and then find those constraints to be in harmony with our goals; and satire, which ridicules the notion that experience can be comprehended by an organizing structure of any kind.