Steve in Action: Social Tagging Tools and Methods Applied

www.steve.museum [email protected]

Steve in Action

Social Tagging Tools and Methods Applied


Who is Steve?

• Steve is a collaborative project, formed in 2005, dedicated to exploring the effectiveness of social tagging for accessing art museum collections online and engaging audiences.


Who is Steve?

• Founded in 2005 as a volunteer effort• Funded as a research project by an IMLS

National Leadership Grant in 2006• Re-funded by IMLS for research activities in

2008, as well as implementation work


Chipstone FoundationCleveland Museum of ArtDenver Art MuseumGuggenheim MuseumLos Angeles County Museum of ArtIndianapolis Museum of ArtThe Metropolitan Museum of ArtMinneapolis Institute of ArtsMinnesota Digital LibraryRubin Museum of ArtSan Francisco Museum of Modern ArtSmithsonian American Art MuseumUCLA Graduate School of Education

and Information StudiesWalker Art Center

Funding: Institute of Museum and Library Services

Listserv Participants: 350 active members

Archives and Museum InformaticsSusan Chun, Independent ConsultantNew Media ConsortiumTaxonomy StrategiesThink DesignUniversity of Maryland, CLiMB Project


http://www.steve.museum


Why study social tagging?Every participant had a different answer

• Can tagging help users find art more easily?

• Can tagging change the way users look at and engage with art?

• Can tagging help museums understand what visitors see and understand?


From: J. P. [email protected]: Sat, 26 Aug 2006 11:24:43 -0700To: [email protected]: Looking for a painting

Please help:

I have been looking on and off for years for this painting. The painting is of a very well dressed renaissance man standing in a room (a library) in front of him on a table is a large hour glass. The painting has very rich colors. I have talked to a lot of people and they have said they have seen this painting but can't remember its name or the name of the artist.

Could you please use your resources to find this painting?

What isn’t the user finding?


Why a research project?

• What conditions yield the most useful and accurate descriptions of artworks?

• What interfaces provide the most engaging user experience?

• Who should tag?• Which works should be tagged?


steve’s Tools


The steve tagger: an open-source, configurable tag collection environment


Available for download at SourceForge.net


The steve term review tool: a tool for reviewing and annotating tags


The steve reporting suite: allowing us to review and analyze the data


Raw data from the research available


2006-08 Research Results

Download the 10MB file in the Research area of www.steve.museum


Some stats from the research:

11 Participating Museums

1,782 Works of Art in the Research

36,981 Tags collected

2,017 Users who tagged


A Few Highlights

88% of tags were useful

If you found this work using this term would you be surprised?

Museum professionalsfound most tags useful


A Few Highlights

Tags are different than museum documentation:

86% of all tags not found in label copy


A Few Highlights

Tags are almost always useful when they are assigned two or more times


A Few Highlights

Institutional Affiliation Matters

• Users invited to tag by The Metropolitan Museum of Art were 4 times as productive

• Multi-Institution Tagger: 22 tags / user• Single-Institution Tagger: 82 tags / user


Q: When you visited steve.museum, did you want

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

don't remember

to see your own previously applied tags

to search the system for sets of works

similar to ones you had seen before

to see if new art was available

to be exposed to works other than what you had seen before

to see what tags others gave to art you had also tagged

to experience tagging art

Public

MMA


Q: Why did you tag?

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

don't remember

to connect with others

so that I could find works again later

other (please specify)

to learn about art

to improve search for other users

for fun

to help museums document art work

Public

MMA


Q: Do you think you might tag more if your local art museum asked you to help them in this way?

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

no response

no

not sure

yes

Public

MMA


Tag Contributor Comment

“I love, love, love this. I feel like I am in school again

learning and contributing to this. It has become a hobby,

I try to do some whenever I have a quiet moment.

I look forward to doing it. I am so excited to be a part of it.”


Tag Contributor Comment

“1. It's fun, interesting, educational, a “trip”.

2. Makes me feel I have a stake in the collections.

3. Delightfully self-aggrandizing.”


Steve in Action: Social Tagging

Tools and Methods Applied

A demonstration grant focusing on encouraging and enabling widespread use of tagging in museums, and in extending the functionality of the steve tool set


A research grant focusing on the usefulness of combining computational linguistics and tagging to assign weights or trust to a set of objects tagged by experts

T3: Text, Tagging, Trust


Networked information still mirrors physical museum reality in many ways. It is still not possible to search art museum collections as a whole; one must separately visit each museum Web site. The information presented is structured according to museum goals and objectives – which may not mesh with those of the user. The language used is often highly specialized and technical, rendering resources inaccessible or incomprehensible.

An on-line work of art or other museum object may be embedded in an exhibition or other interpretive context with a point-of-view not shared by the user. Or inversely, the object may only appear in a database, completely de-contextualized and without the meaning that comes from its cultural context (for example, seeing it alongside other artifacts of the same culture, or viewing how it was used).


- View assigned tags (both MoMA and Visitor tags) - Add tags from available tags - [vote on existing tags - not possible in phase one]


Goals for the program:

The teens will: 1.Learn about educational practices within museums 2.Learn about website design, architecture and functionality3.Create an educational proposal for reaching a specific audience both online and in the galleries4.Implement the proposal

Goals for the site: 1. Learn about the Museum’s programs, events and collections2. Expand minds3. Inspire creativity


• Can tagging serve as a way to help teens/MoMA visitors find unexpected connections between objects in MoMA’s collection?

• How can we use the tags to help deepen teens/MoMA visitors understanding of the objects?

• Can tagging be constructed as a social activity for teens/MoMA visitors?

• How will tagging on the teen site relate to tagging on MoMA’s site (when and if we do that)?

• Will tagging and sorting by tags help make objects in MoMA’s collection more accessible and relevant to the teens?

• Will tagging give us new insights to our teen audience and how to best reach them?

• Could tags be used to help teens learn some art history?


Questions or ideas?

[email protected]

Twitter: steve_museum

Steve in Action: Social Tagging Tools and Methods Applied

Education

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