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Overheard at the Museum 2.0
Susan ChunFounder, Steve: The Museum Social Tagging
Project
DISH Conference, RotterdamDecember 8, 2009
Judith HenryOverheard at the
Museum2000
I think the postcard is better than the painting.
Wow! This painting is like a glass of modernist champagne.
I don’t care for the haystacks and I’ve seen them all.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art: 2 million objects
Philadelphia Museum of Art: 225,000 objects
Asia Society: 300 objects
Collections Information Planning
2004(Thomas Vanderwal coins the term
“folksonomy”)
Thinking about search
What do visitors search for?Are they successful?
About 30% of collection searches yielded null results.
Access points vary.(Visitors and professionals use different terms
to describe collections.)
Visitors Professionals
Colors Creators
Emotions Technique
Iconography Provenance
Materials Materials
Themes Dates
2005(steve is born)
Eleven Museumsand other partners from throughout the community
form a project with an open, collaborative philosophy.
2006-11A series of research and implementation projects
Funded, in part, by the U.S. Institute for Museum and Library Services
Building SoftwareOur toolset
The Steve Tagger: an open source, configurable tag collection environment
Available for download at Sourceforge.com
Steve Term Review: a tool for human review and annotation of tags
Steve Reports: used to normalize, analyze, and study terms
New interfaces for tagging
Research into automated Term Processing:
Term normalizationBlacklist/whitelistSimple stemming
Complex stemmingVocabulary matchingThesaurus application
Clustering/facetingWeighting
DisambiguationPossible language identification
Unique term identification/rare term identificationSentiment analysis
Multi-word tag processing
2008 Research ResultsSome highlights
(full results are available at www.steve.museum)
11 Participating Museums1,782 Works of Art in the Research
36,981 Tags collected 2,017 Users
Museum professionals found most tags “useful.”
88% of tags were reviewed as
“useful.”
“If you searched using this term, would you be
surprised to find this work?”
Tags are different than museum documentation
86% of all tags are not found in label copy
(i.e. 86% of all tags are new access points)
62% of distinct tags not in AAT85% of distinct tags not in ULAN
Tags are almost always “useful” when assigned two or more times.
This kind of finding helps us define algorithms for processing terms.
Institutional affiliation matters:Users tag to help a museum or
other organization with which they feel a bond
Users specifically invited to tag by the Metropolitan Museum of Art were 4 times as productive as
members of the public
Public tagger: 22 tags/userMetropolitan Museum tagger: 84
tags/user
OverheardSome observations not in the research about what visitors say when they tag, and some
thoughts about how we might hear them better
Tag: uncomfortable
The works may evoke strong emotions
Jackson Pollock, Autumn RhythmTag: piece of sh*t
They make private associations (“very personal meanings”) with works.
John Singleton Copley, Portrait of
Paul Revere
Tag: Jack Black
They make private associations (“very personal meanings”) with works.
They use tagging for personal retrieval or to organize works, sometimes across multiple
tagging environments.
Tag: Michael Museum of Art
A Tag Server
TagTagTagTag
Aggregating tags from steve installations, other online
collections, and libraries to support and encourage cross-
collection searching and browsing
They misunderstand works.
Winslow Homer, The Gulf Stream
Tag: dolphins, leisure
They have complex ideas to express.
20% of all tags contributed were multi-word terms.
Raghubir SinghBazaar Through Glass Door,
Bombay
Tags: modern India, old meets new, red shopping bag, defining
moment
They have their own stories to tell or expert knowledge to share.
“My wife and I lived in Baltimore from 1959 to 1964. One of her best friends' father passed away, and she gave my wife this work from his estate. We have proudly owned and displayed it in our home for the past 45 years.”
“This watercolor has been made in 1910 for the french newspaper "l'Illustration". Dulac illustrated each christmas number of the Illustration between 1909 and 1913. I'm a french student (doctorat in History of Art) and wrote a monograph of Edmund Dulac when I was in Master degree.”
Expert Tagging
They speak many languages.
5% of all tags submitted were
non-English.
Winslow Homer, The Boat Builders
Tags: sailbaat, kespaiva, solntze, havet, koast
Multilingual Tagging
They are not malicious.
Only 14 of all tags matched the steve “blacklist”
of profane terms.
Rembrandt, The Nightwatch
#1. “Our visitors want to produce as much as consume, to
speak as much as to listen.”-Matt Adams, Blast Theory,
12/7/09
When they talk, we have the tools to hear them.
#2. You cannot predict when something you do will result in a transformative policy or practice.
Be vigilant, stay alert!
Hartelijk dank voor Uw aandacht!
Share your ideas, questions, and plans for
collaboration:Susan Chun
[email protected]: schun
Stevehttp://www.steve.museum
Twitter: steve_museum
