museumsandtheweb.com - tagging

Mixing It Up: Developing and Implementing a Tagging System for a Content-Rich Website Which Uses Aggregated Content from Multiple Sources

alewis — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 00:47:49 +0000

MW2011

Andrew Lewis, Victoria and Albert Museum, United Kingdom

http://beta.vam.ac.uk

Abstract

In 2009, the Victoria and Albert Museum website had a very large amount of in-depth content including museum content and user-generated features. This presented a challenge in connecting users with site content that they may not have been aware of. In January 2011, the Museum made live a beta version of its redesigned website which aimed to address this issue. The new site moved away from a hierarchical navigation model to a dynamic concept-driven one. This aimed to collect and present content relevant to the user's subject of interest. A central method in achieving this was the development of a tagging system to classify Web content so that it would aggregate as required. This paper looks at the reality of developing and implementing a bespoke tagging system that could be effective for users yet simple enough to use for staff who are not specialist classifiers. The human issues for staff in developing the system are discussed, with some early results and feedback from the early beta-testing period. It is hoped the paper will offer insight into what happens in practice when using tagging for real on a live website.

Keywords: tagging, content, staff, classification, management

Program Item Reference:

Mixing it up: Experiences of managing and displaying aggregated content from multiple sources, combining editorial selection, subject classification using tagging and automated retrieval.

Tag! You're It! What Value Do Folksonomies Bring To The Online Museum Collection?

Susan Cairns — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 23:02:54 +0000

MW2011

Susan Cairns, The University of Newcastle, Australia

Abstract

As growing numbers of museums invite users to digitally tag online collection objects with key words, it is timely to examine the value that this practice can bring to the sector. These tags in their aggregate are known as ëfolksonomiesí and are broad user-derived classifications that are, at their heart, a form of communication (Huang & Chuang, 2009). As a collaborative process with no hierarchical structure (Cameron & Mengler, 2009), folksonomies stand in opposition to traditional museum taxonomies, and present museums with new opportunities for gaining insight into, and interacting with, audiences. Further, through recording evolving language and tag behaviour, folksonomies have the potential to become autonomously important to the museum in its study of people and written historical documentation. This conceptual paper will present an exploratory examination of the value that folksonomies provide to the museum and gallery sector in the digital age. It will demonstrate that incorporating folksonomies with traditional taxonomic museum classification systems provides the museum with an important new way through which to maintain and grow its relevance in the digital age.

Keywords: folksonomies, museum documentation, social media, tagging, taxonomy

Program Item Reference:

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

Playing with Difficult Objects – Game Designs to Improve Museum Collections

mia — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 17:38:54 +0000

MW2011

Mia Ridge, Science Museum, United Kingdom

http://museumgam.es/

Abstract

Crowdsourcing the creation, correction or enhancement of data about objects through games is an attractive proposition for museums looking to maximize use of their collections online without committing intensive curatorial resources to enhancing catalogue records. This paper investigates the optimum game designs to encourage participation and the generation of useful data through a case study of the project Museum Metadata Games that successfully designed games that created improved metadata for 'difficult' objects from two science and history museum collections.

Keywords: collections, games, crowdsourcing, objects, metadata, tagging

Program Item Reference:

Playing with museums - game designs to improve museum collections

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

Required fields are marked with a red asterisk (*).

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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.

Mixing it up: Experiences of managing and displaying aggregated content from multiple sources, combining editorial selection, subject classification using tagging and automated retrieval.

alewis — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 15:28:44 +0000

MW2011

Published Paper:

Mixing It Up: Developing and Implementing a Tagging System for a Content-Rich Website Which Uses Aggregated Content from Multiple Sources

Keywords:

tagging

Keywords:

dynamic Web site

Keywords:

Web content

Keywords:

subject classification

Keywords:

staff

Abstract:

In January 2011, the Victoria and Albert Museum will relaunch its website, with a new design based upon a radically different approach to content which will make users the central focus of the site. It will do this by moving from a static hierarchical navigation structure to a dynamic concept-driven site which will gather the available content relevant to a user’s subject of interest.

When presenting this to the user, museum content will be integrated with user-generated content and content from third-party sites using semantic web technologies, all of which will be returned in a number of ways including using the activity of users to link content.

A number of diverse content systems were used to achieve this, including open source systems such as MySource Matrix and Drupal, in-house systems and third-party services such as Vimeo and Delicious.

This paper will examine the development of the overall range of content management processes to control the new site, and will offer a more detailed look at one of these, the development of an in-house tagging system. It will also examine what happens when you mix up web content from organisational and other sources to demonstrate the effect of these processes on real-life web pages.

Who should attend?

Staff who manage web content, who want to know about creating a dynamically-driven site using a number of different content sources to deliver a consistent experience for their users, or are interested in the use of tagging. It does not cover technical development although this may be mentioned where relevant.

Format

The paper offers a case study of the content management issues that arose during the project, with the focus very much on the practical experience. The presentation will describe the key issues identified, how new processes were developed to address these issues, what worked and what did not and where compromises had to be made, with hints and tips included throughout

A central theme is how best to present content on a single subject from mixed sources, some of which may be selected manually, some automatically aggregated from different sources using manually-applied tagging and some automatically aggregated using search index or user activity data.

As well as the overall experience, the paper will also focus on the in-house development of a manageable content tagging system capable of classifying content within a large body of diverse content that was simple enough for non-specialist staff to use.

The presentation will include a fun practical exercise which will involve you tagging some content. This will require you to experience the actual decision-making process required of staff, who may have to use the tagging systems you may be planning, and will help you better understand the human issues involved in the case study.

Type:

Paper - in formal session

Linked Data

Site:

http://www.vam.ac.uk

Authors:

Andrew Lewis

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

Susan Cairns — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 22:09:27 +0000

MW2011

Published Paper:

Tag! You're It! What Value Do Folksonomies Bring To The Online Museum Collection?

Keywords:

taxonomies

Keywords:

online collections

Keywords:

collections documentation

Keywords:

meaning-making

Keywords:

folksonomies

Keywords:

tagging

Abstract:

As growing numbers of museums invite users to digitally tag online collection objects with key words, it is timely to examine the value that this practice can bring to the sector. These tags in their aggregate are known as ‘folksonomies’ and are broad user-derived classifications that are, at their heart, a form of communication.[1] As a collaborative process with no hierarchical structure,[2] folksonomies stand in opposition to traditional museum taxonomies, and present museums with new opportunities for gaining insight into, and interacting with, audiences. Further, folksonomies give the museum the opportunity to track historical public contributions to museum collection documentation, providing the sector with a possible new avenue for historical document analysis. Through recording evolving language and tag behaviour, folksonomies have the potential to become autonomously important to the museum in its study of people and written historical documentation.

Folksonomies can also provide the museum with a new method for gaining insight into the polysemic nature of online collection objects and for uniting disparate theoretical and practical frameworks of meaning in the online collection. This conceptual paper will present an exploratory examination of the value that folksonomies provide to the museum and gallery sector. Using Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum and the fully Internet-based steve.museum as examples, it will demonstrate that incorporating folksonomies with traditional taxonomic museum classification systems provides the museum with an important new way through which to maintain and grow its relevance in the digital age.

The growing incorporation of folksonomies and other Web2.0 technologies into museum collections practice is a current and important issue for the sector to address and understand. Changes in the technological landscape occur more quickly than the associated theoretical analysis. Therefore investigation into the value that folksonomies provide the online museum collection gives important and timely context for this practice. This research offers an original perspective on these issues.

[1] Andrea Wei-Ching Huang and Tyng-Ruey Chuang, "Social Tagging, Online Communication, and Peircean Semiotics: A Conceptual Framework," Journal of Information Science 35(2009): 341.

[2] Fiona Cameron and Sarah Mengler, “Complexity, Transdisciplinarity and Museum Collections Documentation: Emergent Metaphors for a Complex World,” Journal of Material Culture, 14 (2009): 195

Type:

Paper - in formal session

Tagging

Authors:

Susan Cairns

Computational Linguistics in Museums: Applications for Cultural Datasets

rjstein — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 20:18:31 +0000

MW2011

Published Paper:

Computational Linguistics in Museums: Applications for Cultural Datasets

Keywords:

collection access

Keywords:

steve.museum

Keywords:

tagging

Keywords:

computational linguistics

Keywords:

text processing

Keywords:

cultural data

Abstract:

As museums continue to develop more sophisticated techniques for managing and analyzing cultural data, many are beginning to encounter challenges when trying to deal with the nuances of language and automated processing tools. How might user-generated comments be harvested and processed to determine the nature of the comment? Is it possible to use existing collection documentation to derive relations between similar objects? How can we train systems to automatically recognize (disambiguate) different meanings of the same word? Can automated language processing lead to more compelling browsing interfaces for online collections?

Luckily, a good deal of expertise and tools exist within the field of computational linguistics that can be applied to these problems to achieve meaningful results. Informed by previous work in computational linguistics and relevant project experience, the authors will address a number of these questions providing insight about how answers to impact museum practice might be found. Authors will share tools and resources that museum software developers can use to prototype and experiment with these techniques - without being experts in language processing themselves. In addition, the authors will describe the work of the T3: Text, Tags, Trust research project and how they have applied these tools to a large shared dataset of object metadata and social tags collected by the Steve.museum project.

Specific challenges regarding batch-processing tools and large datasets will be addressed. Best practices and algorithms will be shared for dealing with a number of sticky issues. Directions for future research and promising application areas will be also be discussed.

Type:

Paper - in formal session

Tagging

Authors:

Judith Klavans

Robert Stein

Susan Chun

Raul Guerra