folksonomy

i was supposed to be in Brazil this morning, talking about "Social Tagging and Access to Collections". unfortunately, visa problems made that trip impossible. the presentation was made via podcast; i've put the files on-line.

it's an introduction to the issues that we're exploring in the steve.museum project – how social tagging might enable access to art collections – focusing on the gap between user interests (as we know them from queries and reference questions) and museum documentation as created by and for professionals. This work is more formally presented in other steve papers (see below).

that gap exists partially because our documentation standards are theoretical; designed by and for professionals to serve museum functions. i've participated in many initiatives that explored aspects of access to collections – CHIN, FDA, AITF/CDWA, CIDOC, MESL, AMICO – winner take all in the aconymble contest – and don't dispute this as a valid first premise. it's a place we had to start from, but it may not put us in a good position to support public access.

museum data is still seldom shared beyond the bounds of local systems; and when it is, in early cases like MESL or building The AMICO Library, we discover that institutions adapt standards, rather than adopting them. merging data from disparate sources is hard. we compromise on what has to be merged and end up with thin (lowest common denominator) descriptions that may not be adequate for differentiation between similar objects, and may not support user needs.

i'm more convinced, since the discussion with seb and mike about the contribution of tags, that we need to look at the types of terms we're getting as tags and the types of terms searched, when we build on my preliminary analysis of Guggenheim search logs as part of the steve.museum term analysis.

that way, we'll be able to learn a bit more about the relationship between tag, searches, and documentation structures, and do it within the context of searchers' needs.

we've just released the steve.museum paper that provides background to the demonstration Susan Chun will be giving at ICHIM07. it begins to present the methods for steve.museum's IMLS-funded national leadership grant (research), focussing on our data collection strategy and the steve tagger.

it also includes some preliminary results about attitudes to tagging amongst museum staff, and early analyses of tags collected. Early results in prototype tests are holding up. We're seeing a greater than 75% new tag rate:

"Of the tags assigned to all works during Term Set 1 (March 27– July 11, 2007), 76.5% (7,973 of 10,418) were not found in museum documentation." (Trant 2007)

That means that, during our first phase of data collection, more than three-quarters of the tags assigned in the steve tagger were not found in the museum's own documentation for those works.

/jt

Trant (2007). Trant, J., et al., The eye of the beholder: steve.museum and social tagging of museum collections

, in International Cultural Heritage Informatics Meeting (ICHIM07): Proceedings, J. Trant and D. Bearman (eds). Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. 2007. Published September 30, 2007 at http://www.archimuse.com/ichim07/papers/trant/trant.html

 

got a corvair in my yard

hasn't run in 15 years

it's a home for the birds now

it's no longer a car.

 

Jim White, Corvair, No Such Place

I've been invited to give an update on the activities of steve.museum at the Dublin Core Annual General meeting. While I can't be in Singapore, this invitation did provide the motivation to do a podcast providing an update on where we are with the steve.museum research and highlighting some very early research results. You can download the podcast here.

We're definitely seeing differences in behaviour between tagging on the single-institution site at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the multi-institution site at http://tagger.steve.museum. And we're seeing differences in tagging depending on whether users see object descriptions or not, and whether they see works of art in related sets or not.

The current data collection phase is exploring the effect of showing others tags. In the fall, we'll move on to explore what happens when users can select works to tag. We had some great discussion about what 'choice' means at the steve summer meeting on Grindstone.

The McCord Museum has launched a 'keyword matching game'. Players are asked to supply up to 10 keywords for each of a group of images, within 3 minutes.

It took me a few minutes to figure out the interface -- and i found myself peering at the images [maybe that's just because i've had a long day at the screen, but i was looking for details, and found i was squinting.]

we've just deployed the second phase of the steve.museum tagging experiment. at http://tagger.steve.museum

the steve tagger (a piece of open-source software) is a key tool in our IMLS-funded study of the contribution social tagging and folksonomy can make to on-line access to art collections. throughout our experiement we'll be varying the interface of the tagger to find out what encourages

and we'll also be studying the results of tags, to see if they are:

• real words (we're using word net)
• terms from our discipline (we're using the AAT and ULAN)
• new to the museum (we're comparing to museum documentation)
• appropriate to the work of art (we're doing term-by-term review).

the research process is described in the attached diagram.

we're looking forward to sharing the results of our study with the community. If you'd like to participate, please come by.

• go to http://tagger.steve.museum
• create an account [this is important for our research]
• Tag Art!

/jt

Tagged by Ursula Endlicher and Ela Kagel

TAGallery by CONT3XT.NET extends the idea of a tagged exhibition and transfers the main tasks of noncommercial exhibition spaces to the discourse of an electronic data-space. The method of tagging allows the attribution of artworks to different thematic fields. EXHIBITION_003 was tagged/curated by Ursula Endlicher and Ela Kagel, who started the blog Curating NetArt in May 2006 as ongoing conversations about various topics surrounding media arts. Their exhibition " link.of.thought_thought.of.link..." for TAGallery is an extension of this blog in dialogue-form and a meta-curatorial statement of their perspective on the challenges of curating media/net/art.

Exhibition

http://del.icio.us/TAGallery/EXHIBITION_link.of.thought

Curators' dialogue

http://del.icio.us/TAGallery/TEXTS_link.of.thought

Curators' bio/CV

http://del.icio.us/TAGallery/TAGGERS_link.of.thought

Curators' blog

http://curating-netart.blogspot.com

The question of what makes a 'meaningful' number of queries of an on-line resource has been lingering in the back of my mind ever since i did the analysis of the Guggenheim Museum search logs last fall. At issue, really, is how to profile and analyse the long tail of user searching. (There was a D-Lib article about this not long ago, that talks about ways to analyse the nature of the tail.)

What brought this back to mind was a Hitwise Newsletter report that included the following analysis of terms that contain 'summer'.

Search Terms Analysis: Search Analysis- "summer" Search Term Analysis
Most popular keywords containing the term "summer" for the 4 weeks ending 05/19/07

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has 'soft launched' a tagging application integrated into their on-line collections catalogue.

A tag cloud -- at http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/socialTagging.html -- shows tags assigned anonymously to the collection (tags don't seem to be linked to users though PMA has a My Museum / Gallery feature). Tags in the cloud are sized by frequency; the sequencing isn't immediately obvious.

Any user can add tags to a work, at the collection record. Tags can also be deleted by any user.

Tags are shown in the cloud immediately [presumably with some sort of filtering].

/jt

Tagging today and tomorrow

Thomas Vander Wal

Pew study stats on tagging -- 7% of people in the US study daily

history of tagging in keyword description of resources has a long history (lotus notes, compuserv forums, bitsy)

definitions

• personal free tagging of pages for one's own retrieval

object --> interest --> identity

                /                  |

[culture] [definition] [vocabulary]

in the second session of the tagging workshop ...

Emerging Motivations for Tagging: Expression, Performance and Activism

Alla Zollers

http://www2007.org/workshops/paper_55.pdf

Frank Smadja has set up two polls about tagging:

• Motivation poll -- why do you tag?
• The future of tagging -- have we lived up to the buzz?

go to the site and register your opinion. you have to register in order to vote in both polls ;(

/jt

I'm in Banff this week, at the www2007 meeting. i'm on the program committee for the tagging workshop that is taking place today, and will stay for a bit to see what the technical side of the web is thinking. These are my notes from the things that i've attended (or wish i could attend)...

there was an article in the New York Times this week about social tagging and art that focuses on tagging as a way to bridge the gap between museums as institutions as museum-goers as individuals. when museum professionals talk about introducing people to the collections, their thoughts turn to tours, or slide-shows, or other packaged information products that force visitors' self-identification as a 'beginner". And who wants define themselves as a newbie?

WWW2007 Workshop:

Tagging and Metadata for Social Information Organization

Tuesday May 8, 2007, Banff, Alberta, Canada

Call For Papers and Participation

http://www2007.redlog.net/