An empirically informed taxonomy for the maker movement

Abstract

The Maker Movement emerged from a renewed interest in the physical side of innovation following the dot-com bubble and the rise of the participatory Web 2.0 and the decreasing costs of many digital fabrication technologies. Classifying concepts, i.e. building taxonomies, is a fundamental practice when developing a topic of interest into a research field. Taking advantage of the growth of the Social Web and participation platforms, this paper suggests a multidisciplinary analysis of communications and online behaviors related to the Maker community in order to develop a taxonomy informed by current practices and ongoing discussions. We analyze a number of sources such as Twitter, Wikipedia and Google Trends, applying co-word analysis, trend visualizations and emotional analysis. Whereas co-words and trends extract structural characteristics of the movement, emotional analysis is non-topical, extracting emotional interpretations.