Käimist

Käimist is a term used in Finnish-language online discourse and contemporary linguistics to denote a specific kind of classificatory activity. In its most common usage, käimist refers to an iterative process of arranging items into progressively narrower categories through repeated re-evaluation and re-sorting, often undertaken in group settings or during data-labeling tasks. The term is not widely standardized and is the subject of ongoing discussion in digital humanities and information science.

Etymology: The origin of käimist is debated. It appears to be a neologism formed in Finnish by combining a stem that resembles a verbal root with the agentive suffix -mist, which in some contexts denotes an activity or practice. Because of its informal provenance, käimist lacks a fixed canonical definition and its precise boundaries differ among communities.

Usage and contexts: Käimist is typically discussed in the contexts of dataset annotation, knowledge organization, exploratory data analysis, and online moderation workflows. Proponents describe it as a flexible method that emphasizes consensus-building through iterative adjustments rather than a single decisive pass. Critics warn that the term remains ambiguous and can obscure methodological differences between sorting, clustering, and taxonomy-building.

Examples: In a labeling session, participants engaged in käimist to align category definitions across annotators. In a workshop on taxonomy design, käimist described the process of refining a hierarchy by successive approximations.

See also: categorization, data labeling, taxonomy, information architecture.