Social Classification and Folksonomy in Art Museums: Early Data From the STEVE.MUSEUM Tagger Prototype

Abstract

The collections of art museums have been assembled over hundreds of years and described, organized and classified according to traditions of art historical research and discourse. Art museums, in their role as curators and interpreters of the cultural record, have developed standards for the description of works of art (such as the Categories for the Description of Works of Art, CDWA) that emphasize the physical nature of art as artefact, the authorial role of the creator, the temporal and cultural context of creation and ownership, and the scholarly significance of the work over time. Collections managers have recorded conservation, exhibition, loan and publication history, along with significant volumes of internal documentation of acquisition and storage, that support the custody and care of artefacts of significant cultural value. But the systems of documentation and classification that support the professional discourse of art history and the management of museum collections have failed to represent the interests, perspectives or passions of those who visit [use?] museum collections, both on-site and online. As museums move to reflect the breadth of their audiences and the diversity of their perspectives, so must museum documentation change to reflect concerns other than the traditionally art historical and museological.

Time‐based tags for fiction movies: comparing experts to novices using a video labeling game

“…One of the key factors in the success of social tagging in engaging different types of users is the reduction of intermediary steps followed in traditional indexing practices, saving the user from the need for first thinking on a concept and then representing it through the correct term from a controlled vocabulary (Halpin, Robu, & Shepherd, ). Different studies compare socially generated tags by nonexpert users with the metadata created by indexing experts (Gligorov et al, ; Lu et al, ; Matusiak, ; Springer et al, ; Thøgersen, ; Trant, ).…”

Characteristics of tagging behavior in digitized humanities online collections

“…This finding supports an assumption that tags can be a source for new terms to describe existing concepts that should be considered for inclusion as preferred or nonpreferred terms in extant vocabulary resources (Peters, ). Trant () also pointed out that tags contain additional information that could be used to enlarge the structured vocabulary used by the professional museum experts for characterizing digital cultural heritage resources. In the process of selecting indexing terms, information professionals are led by two principles of literary warrant and user warrant in that the words or phrases determined as descriptors should be drawn from or matched in the literature (literary warrant), and the terms most frequently used by users when requesting information on the concept should be selected as a preferred term in a thesaurus (NISO, ).…”

Flipping the Field Trip: Bringing the Art Museum to the Classroom

“…Analysis of terms collected in the prototype steve-tagger suggests that social tagging of art museum objects can create unique access points not found in cataloguing works of art with traditional museum nomenclature (Trant, 2006). The future potential for teachers tagging museum objects goes beyond visual art classifications that exist in popular culture, such as Impressionism or, as previously mentioned, painting versus oil on canvas.…”