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?"
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Here is good example of a type of tagging that you are probably already familiar with, for those of you that are still struggling with what exactly it is. This is not "tagging" exactly as defined by the delicious site, but it's close.
ReplyDeleteYour Ipod. Your Ipod uses meta data (which tagging uses) in much the same way that these sites do. Your songs have info like artist name, song title, album title, and genre attached to them. This is not file name. It is not what you see when you look at a song file on your hard drive but the information is there for the right application (the software on your ipod) to read. Your ipod organizes your songs in much the same way that a site like delicious is organizing web sites accept that with sites like delicious the tags (the meta data) is colaborative.
Your questions pose ethical issues for sure. They remind me a lot about the debated discussions that happen in Barb Suplee's aesthetics class.
ReplyDeleteI think arguing and political debates are healthy and natural. I think if you can get kids to debate about issues in classroom all the better. Social Tagging could certainly provoke this type of conversation in the classroom.
There is the idea that was mentioned in the one museum, 1000 tags article. That museum only allowed words from a list to be used as tags on images in the online museum. Although, the list of of words is limiting to people's imaginations: this might be a good idea for the classroom. The teacher can create a more controlled environment to steer the type of learning they want to take place from tagging images.
As far as for the general public,
I think for museum social tagging, if the museum has rights to the website and the images on the website then they do have the right to censor the tagging that takes place on the web site.
I have really been struggling with the questions that you have posted about museum tagging. First, I think that the definition of an inappropriate tag needs to stated or decided by the museum. If someone wanted to tag Maplethorpe's work with "Horrible", "Distasteful", or "Child_Pornography" I think that they should be allowed to, their opinions should not be thrown out. Hateful or disrespectful tags should never be allowed. The public should be aware of what everyone thinks about works of art. As far as the last two questions go, I think that museums can tackle both of those problems. They should provide an open forum for debate, discussion, and open tagging. While at the same time, images should be viewable with the tags the museum deems appropriate. The museum can also choose what tags to allow by the discussion on the open forum. I can imagine a Wikipedia like scenario, if information is questionable, warnings or alerts can accompany image tags.
ReplyDeleteWww.letssingit.com is a song lyric database where anyone can contribute lyrics to any song. Sometimes someone will add incorrect lyrics and someone else can fix them, or edit them. In the same way, maybe the public can edit the tags of a museum website. Or, another idea is that maybe whoever runs the site can set it so that the top 100 tags are used so that really random tags are discarded.
ReplyDeleteThis is a interesting time of deconstructing social and educational systems of all types and creating new models. Are there universal standards that can maintained as we go forward? What are they?
ReplyDelete