How is social tagging used in art museums? How will it be used in the future?

How is social tagging used in art museums?

Social tagging is something that still meets with some resistance from much of the public and academics especially. The skepticism might be well deserved since this potluck online style of acquiring information is not keeping with the tradition of peer reviewed study that has been in place for generations. Despite this initial resistance the benefits of utilizing a folksonomy such as a wiki or a tagging system are becoming clearer everyday. Instead of taking years to catalogue online collections the public accomplishes the task for the institution while hopefully at the same time participating in some educational program or at least having some fun. The basics: a user visits a museum’s web site, views artwork, and than through personal interest, by playing a game, or participating in a related online community contributes descriptions of what they are seeing in words or phrases. The Institutions collect all of the contributions as meta-data. This data applies only to that individual piece but is also available for cross-reference through a search engine. It is essentially the exact same thing that Google has been doing with web sites for years but on a smaller scale. If you want to find a web site on fly fishing you just search for that phrase and every site with “fly fishing” in it’s meta data comes up. If you want to find a piece of art work you saw and can only remember that it was a painting of a battle field than just search the collection for “war” and you will be looking at every piece in the museum that is war related in some way. This is a revolutionary way of presenting art collections because it enables users, like children, to find work they are interested in without having possess all of the academic information behind it. Instead of having to know the artist, date, and nationality a child could find the painting Starry Night just by searching key words like “star” or “dreamy”.
Encouraging users to engage in social tagging is not as simple as just making it available though. The Brooklyn Museum has barrowed a game from Google to give the public and educators a fun way to contribute. The tagging game, as originally conceived of in the Google Image Labeler application, is simple. Two users are shown the same image at the same time and they begin tagging until they both get the same tag. In other words, if they are looking at a picture of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers than they would tag until they both hit on the world yellow, for example, and than they would be allowed to move onto the next image. They can be scored according to how quickly they accomplish each task and/or by how many they accomplish in their session. The game can even list high scorers like an old- fashioned arcade game. The user gets a game and the museum get’s a service that previously would have taken armies of employees years to complete. This game and self-designed scavenger hunts make museum collections available to students and educators out side of the museum with a level of accessibility that has never been seen before.
Another way that tagging is being utilized in museums is through third party participants like Steve: The museum social tagging project. This project is run by museum professionals with a government grant and it works essentially the same as any other tagging application accept that the Steve application utilizes pieces from participating museums all over the country. The other objective of the Steve project is to collect research information. So, while they are collecting tags they are also collecting information on the whole folksonomy phenomenon to study how tagging can increase accessibility to museum resources. This information will ultimately be used by the participating museums to design tagging applications so that they will work better and have a wider array of features. The Steve application however has been used by others as well. It now has a face book application, which allows users to play with Steve museum through their favorite social networking site. In theory, anyone can take this application and use to enrich their own online community and/or collect information on the tagging activities of that community. The research possibilities are endless.
Social book marking and the whole lexicon of applications in the new online folksonomy are still very young. Despite the obvious growing pains it is becoming clear that they will have a larger impact on every corner of academia as time goes by. As a museum’s online collections create tag collections of their own they will naturally grow larger and become more refined and efficient to use. In all likely hood the way that social tagging is utilized by museums will evolve drastically in years to come but the bare bones of the process is already in place. The foundation has been laid for a complete paradigm shift in exhibition, both digital and in the real world.

Here are some of the tagging sections of various art museums web sites. Some are Steve participants and some have developed their own tagging system. I have also included and informative New York Times article on the topic.

http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/socialTagging.html

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/bloggers/2008/08/01/tag-youre-it/

http://www.sfmoma.org/pages/research_projects_steve

http://www.steve.museum/

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/28/arts/artsspecial/28social.html

About social tagging on museum web sites

The inclusion of social tagging applications on museum web sites could be complicated but certainly worthwhile. I love the idea of tagging museum pieces on line in general. It seems like the perfect way to engage this and coming generations in the museum experience. Also, it makes it easy for educators to carry the experience of a museum visit outside of the museum and back into the classroom. By allowing kids to investigate a museum collection online you are putting it on terms that they are already comfortable with, not to mention making the artwork fundamentally accessible to populations that might never set foot in such an institution.
My only concern is that while it certainly increases accessibility to have an active relationship between the physical collection, the web site, and the public there could be problems with defacing of certain works of art by including unsavory tags. For example, much of the work of photographer John Maple Thorpe deals with homosexual themes and if the public were aloud to make public comment about such work through tags than I hardly need to offer examples of the type of offensive language that might become part of the online presence of such a piece of art if it were open to public input. The easy answer to this problem is that there is obviously an administrator who looks after the web site and will address these concerns. However there are numerous examples of artwork which could spark debates that are far less cut and dry than the example I have offered. Many pieces of art are intentionally vague or designed specifically to evoke a response from certain groups of people. So my questions are…

Is a museum web site, which would usually be designed and administrated with education in mind, the right place for such political debates to occur?

If they do occur than does the museum reserve any right to repress certain viewpoints?

If they do have the right than do they have some larger social responsibility to allow their web site to become a place for online discourse?

My question for the museum tagging group is "how does it work?"

Social-Taggin'-Meta Data-Wordle'n

http://www.wordle.net/create

I guess my attitude about social tagging and metadata dates me in a lot of ways. While I consume digital media of various kinds ravenously I have this mental block that prevents me from treating it differently than I do stacks of real life books and discs. While I am constantly downloading music and movies I can never bring my self to care about metadata because my real life organizational habits more or less carry over to all of my digital libraries. I have a friend that obsessively creates Meta data for everything on his hard drive, but he is also some body who makes little tags for his bookshelves as if it were a bookstore or library. My organizational sense revolves around obscure things that only make sense to me. A pile of books on my shelf may look completely unrelated accept that I put them there because they are all good visual references, so a time life book on wildlife ends up right next to a book full of 19th century photos of Philadelphia. It looks random to an outsider but to me that is organization. Do any of you use social tagging systems in ways that are especially particular to your self? What do you think these little personal systems say about who you are?