museumsandtheweb.com - social tagging

Exploring Affective Computing for Enhancing the Museum Experience with Online Collections

Gunho — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:12:21 +0000

MW2012

Gunho Chae, KAIST, Republic of Korea / S. Joon Park, Drexel University, USA / Robert Stein, Indianapolis Museum of Art, USA / Jungwha Kim, KAIST, Republic of Korea / Susan Wiedenbeck, Drexel University, USA

Abstract

Program Item Reference:

Exploring Affective Computing for Enhancing the Museum Experience with Online Collections

Gunho — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 01:52:35 +0000

MW2012

Published Paper:

Exploring Affective Computing for Enhancing the Museum Experience with Online Collections

Keywords:

Online Museum

Keywords:

social tagging

Keywords:

collection access

Keywords:

image retrieval

Keywords:

Affective Embedded Agent

Keywords:

Collection Search

Abstract:

Introduction

Traditionally, the focus of online museum collections has been to facilitate access and discovery for subject category experts seeking information about objects in the collection (Rayward & Twidale, 1999). Today, museums observe an increasing number of ‘untrained eyes’ visiting their online collections to browse or search art collections for intrinsic enjoyment and leisure (Marty, Sayre, & Fantoni, 2011; Packer, 2010). Research by the Steve.museum social tagging project has demonstrated that the language used by novice visitors to describe works of art differs significantly from that descriptive metadata used by museums to describe the same collections (Trant, 2009). Many visitors to museums’ online collections seek experience-centered online experiences that can be fun and pleasurable, rather than a suite of advanced features.

However, most of today’s online collections do not fully support such an experience-centered environment. A quick survey could show that these systems lack not only functionality, but also the appropriate affective and hedonic aspects necessary to support such an experience (Blythe, Wright, McCarthy, & Bertelsen, 2006). It is necessary to take holistic approaches for online museum experiences, which go beyond accessibility and functionality, to address the aspects of emotional interaction (Johnson, Gardner, & Wiles, 2004).

Research Outline

Using the online collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA), this study seeks to design and implement an affective online search and retrieval system for visitors who may have general interests in art, but may not know where to start. Techniques from the affective computing literature will be applied to develop an affective embedded agent that can recognize and respond to the users’ expressed emotions and preferences. Social tagging tools will be used to record the visitors’ subjective views and interests in arts. These social tags will inform the affective agent and allow it to interact with visitors based on this information.

Because the proposed agent uses interactive techniques to incorporate the users’ emotions and preferences during the image retrieval process, the untrained online visitors can easily refine their interests about art collections and map those interests to terminology and metadata maintained by the museum. As such, online visitors do not need to be subject matter experts with knowledge in art historical terminology to navigate art collections; an enjoyable browsing experience can be created to support visitors’ known and unknown preferences. This study can contribute to the field of museum technology by providing empirical guidelines on how an affective agent can be designed and influence the internal state of a person to improve overall museum experience in an online setting.

Conclusion

When combined with user-generated social tags, an embedded agent can be a powerful search method that provides ‘general-purpose question-answering capabilities’ in the context of online museums (Etzioni, 2011). We hope our research serves to broaden our understanding of the role that emotions play in use of search and retrieval systems by novices, and that it will provide useful guidelines for the online museum community in studying interactions with systems that are intelligent and sensitive to online visitors’ emotions and preferences.

References

Blythe, M., Wright, P., McCarthy, J., Bertelsen, O. W. (2006). Theory and Method for Experience Centered Design, CHI 2006, April 22-27, Montreal, Canada.

Etzioni, O. (2011). “Search needs a shake-up,” Nature, Macmillan Publishers Limited, 476, 25-26.

Johnson, D., Gardner, J., & Wiles, J. (2004). Experience as a moderator of the media equation: the impact of flattery and praise, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 61, 237-258.

Marty, P. F., Sayre, S., & Fantoni, S. (2011). Personal digital collections: Involving users in the co-creation of digital cultural heritage. In G. Styliaras, D. Koukopoulos, & F. Lazarinis (Eds.), Handbook of research on technologies and cultural heritage: Applications and environments (pp. 285–304). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

Packer, J. (2010). Beyond Learning: Exploring Visitors’Perceptions of the Value and Benefits of Museum Experiences Curator, The Museum Journal, 51(1), 33-54.

Rayward, W. B. & Twidale, M. B. (1999). From Docent to Cyberdocent: Education and Guidancein the Virtual Museum, Archives and Museum Informatics, Volume 13, Number 1, 23-53.

Trant, J. (2009). Tagging, Folksonomy and Art Museums: Results of steve.museum’s research, Archives & Museum Informatics, http://conference.archimuse.com/files/trantSteveResearchReport2008.pdf

Type:

Paper - in formal session

Online finding

Authors:

Gunho Chae

S. Joon Park

Robert Stein

Jungwha Kim

Susan Wiedenbeck

Can Social Tagging Be a Tool to Reduce the Semantic Gap between Curators and Audiences? Making a Semantic Structure of Tags by Implementing the Facetted Tagging System for Online Art Museums

Gunho — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 21:48:31 +0000

MW2011

Gunho Chae and Jungwha Kim, KAIST, Republic of Korea

Abstract

Social tagging for art museums has been receiving widespread attention as a tool for reducing the semantic gap between curators and visitors by the publicís active participation and knowledge. However, as the number of tags is increasing, social tagging systems have shown limitations in providing meaningful information and supporting semantic relationships between tags and museum collections. Thus, to improve existing social tagging systems, this study proposes a facetted tagging system which gives a guideline or schema for the users when tagging the individual artworks. In order to demonstrate the effectiveness of a facetted tagging system in art museums we first presented six facets Background, Identification, Theme, Association, Emotion and Figureî – based on explanation and interpretation of art works so that the tags can be organized in semantic structure. Then we implemented the facetted tagging system with Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art (GMoMA) and discussed the feasibility of facetted tagging systems and their results with GMoMA curators through workshops.

Keywords: Art Museum, Social tagging, Facetted Tagging, GMoMA

Program Item Reference:

Can Social Tagging Be a Tool to Reduce the Semantic Gap between Curators and Audiences? Making a Semantic Structure of Tags by Implementing Facetted Tagging System for Online Art Museums

Computational Linguistics in Museums: Applications for Cultural Datasets

schun — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 17:52:43 +0000

MW2011

Judith Klavans, University of Maryland; Robert Stein, Indianapolis Museum of Art; Susan Chun, Independent Consultant and Researcher; Raul David Guerra, University of Maryland, USA

Abstract

This paper presents work of the T3: Text, Tags, Trust project, an interdisciplinary collaboration of computational linguists, computer scientists, indexing and information retrieval experts, and museum professionals from the University of Maryland and Steve: The Museum Social Tagging Project. The authors define some key problems for managing large-scale datasets, share tools and resources developed for the project, and describe ways that these resources can be deployed by museums without expertise in language processing. In addition, the paper examines some of the ways in which analysis of data collected by the Steve project builds on our understanding of the ways in which users see and describe our collections. The specific challenges of applying batch-processing tools and methods to large, unstructured datasets are addressed, best practices for dealing with a number of sticky issues are shared, and promising applications for future research and promising application areas are considered.

Keywords: computational linguistics, social tagging, steve.museum, collection access, text processing, metadata

Program Item Reference:

Computational Linguistics in Museums: Applications for Cultural Datasets

Tour of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

dbear — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 20:08:12 +0000

MW2011

Keywords:

new media

Keywords:

social tagging

Keywords:

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Keywords:

Marc Chagall

Abstract:

Members of the museum's web team and collections information project
will discuss the online collection database and special exhibition
components of the museums' web site. The museum has used its own cell
phone audio system and uses audio and video podcasts extensively to
enhance the visitor experience online and in the galleries. The current
work on the Chagall video tour
http://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/401.html will be highlighted.
User contributed content and how that integrates into the collection
information pages and exhibition pages will also be demonstrated,
highlighting the work that has been done with social tagging of objects
and exhibition discussions that are accessed both online and in the
gallery.

Type:

Other Interaction - describe in notes

Tour 2: New Media in Arts and Social Science Museums

Authors:

William Weinstein

Tagging

dbear — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 20:30:56 +0000

Type:

Session

Chair:

Timothy Hart

Programs:

Tag! You’re It! What value do folksonomies bring to the online museum collection?

Can Social Tagging Be a Tool to Reduce the Semantic Gap between Curators and Audiences? Making a Semantic Structure of Tags by Implementing Facetted Tagging System for Online Art Museums

Computational Linguistics in Museums: Applications for Cultural Datasets

Date & Time:

April 7, 2011 - 1:00pm - 2:30pm

Location:

Commonwealth A/B

tagging

social tagging

semantic indexing

computational linguistics

folksonomy

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Archives & Museum Informatics EIN: 77-0708617; GST / BN 887978914

Description

Words, words, words. Whose words, why words, how words? Tags are just language but who assigns them, how and where, in in what relations to existing description is all critical to understanding, and ultimately to using, tags. In this session tagging discussion advances from art to science.

Can Social Tagging Be a Tool to Reduce the Semantic Gap between Curators and Audiences? Making a Semantic Structure of Tags by Implementing Facetted Tagging System for Online Art Museums

Gunho — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 02:50:11 +0000

MW2011

Published Paper:

Can Social Tagging Be a Tool to Reduce the Semantic Gap between Curators and Audiences? Making a Semantic Structure of Tags by Implementing the Facetted Tagging System for Online Art Museums

Keywords:

social tagging

Keywords:

Facetted Tagging

Keywords:

curators and audiences

Keywords:

Online Museum

Keywords:

Museum Communication

Abstract:

After the emergence of Web 2.0, online art museums have been evolving into participatory museums, in an attempt to increase the public’s participation through the utilization of social media. Among many types of social media, social tagging has been receiving widespread attention as a tool for reducing the semantic gap between curators and visitors, through the group knowledge obtained from the active participation of the public.

In this circumstance, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art (GMOMA) embarked on an ongoing project with us to explore the potential of social tagging and applying it into museum management strategy. In the end of 2009, we built our own tag database based on the collections from GMOMA, and experiments were carried out by building a testbed on a website that was created to collect tags of 128 pieces of artworks.

After collecting the tags, we evaluated the feasibility of social tagging systems through workshops with curators from GMOMA. From the workshop we found the potentials of social tagging systems in museums through interviews and discussions with the curators, and identified the improvements that could be made in order to apply it to actual museums.
However, we discovered that while the number of tags increased, social tagging systems showed limitations in providing meaningful information and supporting semantic relationships between tags and museum collections.

The causes are as follows:

Lack of order, structure and depth in tags
Linguistic issues
Free forms of tags can cause ambiguity, chaos and noise
Spam tagsFailure to show the semantic relationships between tags; only provides an alphabetical list

Thus to achieve a participatory web and reflect the visitors’ semantic appreciation of museum collections, we conclude that the existing tagging systems should be supplemented. To improve the existing social tagging system and enhance the semantic appreciation in online art museum, our suggested solution is faceted tagging system which gives a guideline or schema to users when tagging the individual artworks. By collecting tags through the faceted tagging systems, we can automatically obtain a semantic structure and meaningful groups of tags. Before implementing the faceted tagging system and proving that it works, we had to make facets that cover the all the categories of art museum tags. We proceeded with card-sorting tests to extract and verify facets from the collected tag database. We retrieved six facets – “Background, Identification, Theme, Association, Emotion and Figure” – based on the semantic structure of tags, which were in a mess but now can be categorized into meaningful groups (facets).

Finally, user-tests are scheduled in order to prove that applying the six facets into the faceted tagging system can help to bridge the semantic gap between curators and audiences. For the user-tests, the same 128 artworks from the first experiment will be used, and we will compare the tags collected from the user-tests with the tags from the first experiment. Then we plan to discuss the feasibility of faceted tagging systems and its results – which we call structured tags – through a workshop with the curators from GMOMA.

Type:

Paper - in formal session

Tagging

Authors:

Gunho Chae

Jungwha Kim

Steve.museum: An Ongoing Experiment in Social Tagging, Folksonomy, and Museums

jtrant — Thu, 01 May 2008 18:19:53 +0000

Chun, S., Cherry R., Hiwiller D., Trant J., & Wyman B. (2006). Steve.museum: An Ongoing Experiment in Social Tagging, Folksonomy, and Museums. (Trant, Jennifer, David Bearman, Ed.).Museums and the Web 2006: Proceedings.