museumsandtheweb.com - folksonomy

Yvonne Hellin-Hobbs

Yvonne Hellin-Hobbs — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 13:01:44 +0000

Hi, I'm a new member so am not sure entirely how this all works yet but excited to find out. I am currently putting together a research proposal for an MA dissertation on museums and the web. I am interested in the Steve. museums project and wondered if anyone knew of any similar experiments taking place in England. I know a lot of museums are going down the digitising route, but are any allowing feedback from their audience? I'd appreciate any info anyone has. Other European sites would be of interest too. Thanks, and looking forward to some interesting conversations!

steve.museum research report available: Tagging, Folksonomy and Art Museums

jtrant — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 21:31:34 +0000

Tagging, Folksonomy and Art Museums: Results of steve.museum’s research

J. Trant, Archives & Museum Informatics

Abstract
Tagging has proven attractive to art museums as a means of enhancing access to on-line collections. The steve.museum research project studied tagging and the relationship of the resulting folksonomy to professionally created museum documentation. A variety of research questions were proposed, and methods for answering them explored. Works of art were assembled to be tagged, a tagger was deployed, and tagging encouraged. A folksonomy of 36,981 terms was gathered, comprising 11,944 terms in 31,031 term/work pairs. The analysis of the tagging of these works – and the assembled folksonomy – is reported here, and further work described.

New Article: Tagging, Folksonomy and Art Museums: Early Experiments and Ongoing Research

jtrant — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 21:32:05 +0000

Abstract

Tagging has proven attractive to art museums as a means of enhancing the indexing of online collections. This paper examines the state of the art in tagging within museums and introduces the steve.museum research project, and its study of tagging behaviour and the relationship of the resulting folksonomy to professionally created museum documentation. A variety of research questions are proposed and methods for answering them discussed. Experiments implemented in the steve.museum research collaboration are discussed, preliminary results suggested, and further
work described.

J Trant. Tagging, Folksonomy and Art Museums: Early Experiments and Ongoing Research, Journal of Digital Information, Vol 10, No 1 (2009) available at : http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/270/277

New Article: Studying Social Tagging and Folksonomy: A Review and Framework

jtrant — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 21:25:05 +0000

Abstract

This paper reviews research into social tagging and folksonomy (as reflected in about 180 sources published through December 2007). Methods of researching the contribution of social tagging and folksonomy are described, and outstanding research questions are presented. This is a new area of research, where theoretical perspectives and relevant research methods are only now being defined. This paper provides a framework for the study of folksonomy, tagging and social tagging systems. Three broad approaches are identified, focusing first, on the folksonomy itself (and the role of tags in indexing and retrieval); secondly, on tagging (and the behaviour of users); and thirdly, on the nature of social tagging systems (as socio-technical frameworks).

J Trant, Studying Social Tagging and Folksonomy: A Review and Framework, Journal of Digital Information, Vol 10, No 1 (2009) available at http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/269/278

LC Flickr Commons Report Available

jtrant — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 22:33:11 +0000

the Library of Congress has made a detailed report of their experiments with the Flickr Commons available on their web site at http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/flickr_pilot.html

They note the following in their summary:

there's no such thing as 'museum content'

jtrant — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 23:37:30 +0000

There's a sentence from the Museums and the Web 2008 Proceedings that keeps coming back to me, as i think about things as wide-ranging as tag analysis for steve.museum, and the nature of professional training in museums, archives and libraries.

When discussing the use of museum-materials posted on YouTube a group of museum professionals noted that “the people watching this were not searching for ‘museum’ content; they were searching for "calligraphy" content” (Alexander et al., 2008).

upcoming presentation: steve.museum research results @ mcn

jtrant — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:35:10 +0000

as principal investigator of the steve.museum IMLS research grant, wrapping up this december, i'll be presenting further results from our tagging study at the upcoming museum computer network conference:

Friday November 14, 2008
Grand Hyatt, Washington, DC

Should You Care about Social Tagging? – Findings and Recommendations from steve.museum

tagging and folksonomy keynote @ DC2008

jtrant — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 12:39:58 +0000

i gave a keynote this morning at the Dublin Core Metadata Meeting - DC2008 on access to art museums on-line: a role for social tagging and folksonomy? that reports on more of the steve.museum tagging data analysis. this talk built on what i reported at NKOS last week [steve.museum: public and professional vocabularies. presentation @ NKOS 2008] and extended it to include some thoughts on user-generated metadata – useful in the context of DC, which began its life as a format for encoding user-created metadata – and a bit of work about the relationships between tags and search logs.

my slides are here (without some of the funky builds).

while we'd hypothesized that there might be a tight relationship between tags and search terms, what we found was a much looser coupling. whether this is a self-fulilling prophesy – because searches on the kinds of subject and genre terms that they use to tag fail, people don't use them – or because description and retrieval vocabularies vary at some other level still needs some thought. that's what the examples we looked at seemed to indicate, and a place i'll be looking further.

steve.museum: public and professional vocabularies. presentation @ NKOS 2008

jtrant — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 13:50:15 +0000

David and i presented the first of the steve.museum research results at the NKOS workshop today. the [many] slides are attached to this post. the take aways, though, can be easily summarized:

85%+ of tags are not found in museum documentation
60%+ tags don't match vocabularies [and those that do match ambiguously]
most tags can't be mined from other sources [like published catalogues or other scholarly works]

Public tagging vocabulary is different from the vocabulary in museum professional documentation. So tagging does contribute.

Contribute to what? well, we still need to look further into the details, particularly the relationships between tags and search terms to talk about that with more confidence. Watch for that from the Dublin Core (DC2008) meeting next week.

upcoming presentations on tagging and art museums

jtrant — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 13:47:39 +0000

the fall travel season is starting up again, and we're in Europe this week and next presenting research results from the steve.museum project. watch for the following:

Public and professional vocabularies: comparing user tagging with museum documents and documentation

The 7th European Networked Knowledge Organization Systems (NKOS) Workshop at the 12th ECDL Conference, Aarhus, Denmark
Friday September 19th 2008 [see the program on-line]

David and i will be talking about the differences between public tagging vocabularies and the language of art cataloguing and curators.

and

steve.museum: tagging art. research and results

International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, Berlin, Germany
Tuesday 23 September 2008 [see the program on-line]

i'm keynoting DC2008 – talking about the role of tagging in retrieval-focused museum metadata.

We're are looking forward to catching up with old friends, and – of course – i'll be posting notes and thoughts as we go.

steve.museum wins honorary mention at PRIX ARS ELECTRONICA

jtrant — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:38:42 +0000

The PRIX ARS ELECTRONICA were announced yesterday, and steve.museum received an honorary mention in the Digital Communities category.

Slidecast of Seeing Tibetan Art through Social Tags

smannion — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:46:59 +0000

For those who are interested in social tagging, or who might have missed the Community Engagement session at MW2008, I have uploaded my slides "Seeing Tibetan Art through Social Tags" along with audio track to Slideshare:

http://www.slideshare.net/s.mannion/seeing-tibetan-art-through-social-tags/

steve.museum announces facebook application: tag art in your profile

jtrant — Tue, 27 May 2008 22:55:33 +0000

steve.museum has released enhancements to the steve tagger. you can now:

share images and tags
invite others to participate, and
display your tagged works on a Facebook profile pages, invite FB friends to tag, and see the most popular tagged works of art.

PDF- Now we have Web 2.0 tools, how do we use them?

dgreenfield — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 15:17:32 +0000

Several people asked for a copy of my presentation, so here is a pdf of it.
Thanks for the attending/participating!

steve.museum term review: lots of useful tags

jtrant — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 19:12:07 +0000

At the steve.museum session at MCN we devoted a significant amount of time to "Term Review" –– what we're calling the qualitative study of tags by professionals from participating museums within the context of the steve.museum research project. It fed really nicely into a discussion at the project team research meeting post-MCN.

For some, the very possibility that tags contributed by taggers of works of art might be reviewed by museums is antithetical to the ethos of user tagging. But, within the context of steve.museum it's essential for developing our understanding of the contribution that tagging and folksonomy might make to the accessibility of works of art on-line.

How, for example, can we respond to our colleagues' concern that tags will be inaccurate | misleading | misspelled | mis-guided, if we don't look at them and see if they are? How can we say that they might be useful, if we haven't looked?

Social Tagging and Access to Collections: podcast + some followup thoughts

jtrant — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 17:49:36 +0000

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.

steve.museum paper for ichim07

jtrant — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 14:10:02 +0000

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

classification, folksonomy and lyrics

jtrant — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 16:58:10 +0000

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

steve.museum update for the Dublin Core Annual Meeting

jtrant — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 13:39:09 +0000

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.

Tagging game at the McCord Museum, Montreal

jtrant — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 22:30:19 +0000

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.]

steve.museum term set 2 data collection launched

jtrant — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 12:37:37 +0000

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

TAGallery 003_link.of.thought_thought.of.link...

fratha — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 09:06:27 +0000

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

search term analysis: percentages of term use in a hitwise report

jtrant — Thu, 31 May 2007 15:22:01 +0000

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

tagging the Philadelphia Museum of Art Collection

jtrant — Wed, 23 May 2007 13:44:59 +0000

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

@www2007 in Banff -- tagging workshop -- Thomas Vander Wal

jtrant — Tue, 08 May 2007 20:55:31 +0000

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]

@www2007 in Banff -- tagging workshop -- session 2

jtrant — Tue, 08 May 2007 18:01:27 +0000

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

@www2007 in Banff -- tagging workshop -- poll

jtrant — Tue, 08 May 2007 16:45:17 +0000

Frank Smadja has set up two polls about tagging:

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

/jt

@www2007 in Banff -- tagging workshop

jtrant — Tue, 08 May 2007 16:37:28 +0000

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)...

New York Times on Social Tagging and Art

jtrant — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 14:34:52 +0000

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?

Call for Papers: WWW2007 Tagging Workshop

jtrant — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 20:52:02 +0000

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/