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.

Meeting virtually at www.steve.museum

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

susan@steve.museumTwitter: schun

Stevehttp://www.steve.museum

Twitter: steve_museum