One Picture, 1,000 Tags
One Picture, 1000 tags (The New York Times, March 28, 2007)
If you try to find paintings on the museum’s web site, you will probably fail unless you know the title or artist. In order to increase accessibility, a dozen museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art are redesigning their online site by encouraging the public to annotate their collections with descriptive tags.
However, this tagging application could cause a huge semantic gap between the public and curators. For example, the Metropolitan Museum of Art ran a test in which volunteers supplied keywords for 30 images of paintings and sculptures. The tags were compared with the museum’s curatorial catalog, and more than 80 percent of the terms were not in the museum’s documentation. Nevertheless, ironically, since the art professionals can find it difficult to describe the visual elements of a picture and there is no taxonomic system, museums want the public to participate for a lot of tags of each image. Tags – from obvious to personal – can also be used to proclaim a personal connection with a work of art. These ‘collective intelligence’ projects might bring the collection alive.
[Relevant lectures]
5. CONCEPTS & CATEGORIES (9/15)
7. CONTROLLED NAMES AND VOCABULARIES (9/22)
14. SOCIAL / DISTRIBUTED CATEGORIZATION (10/15)
16. CONTENT MANAGEMENT (10/22)
Ryan Said,
September 2, 2008 @ 5:03 pm
This sounds like an interesting project. To me one of the neat aspects of tags/folksonomy is seeing what terms people choose to identify (for example) popular photos on Flickr. It’s possible that once museums have hundreds of tags associated with art that they will see new patterns, categories, or mental models of categorization that they hadn’t considered before.
If you’re looking for something interactive and similar, check out the Google Image Labeler.
John A. Black, Jr Said,
September 8, 2008 @ 12:46 pm
I agree that this sounds like an interesting project, and that museums (or Google) might be able to discover new patterns, categories, and mental models. However, it is a shame that museum (and Google) are not making these word databases available online, as they are being collected. When the public actively participates in the process of compiling such databases, the public should be given access to them.