What is Museum Tagging?

What is Museum tagging?

Faced with organizing their collections of online images some Museums have embraced web2.0. They have turned to the public to help them. Tapping into the collective intelligence, they have started using social tagging to catalog their images.

Tagging is the process of assigning keywords to pieces of information to aid in its sorting and, later, retrieval. Tags can be used to sort information in text, photographs or images – for example, on sites like delicious or flicker. As others contribute to the words used to sort the information, the act becomes social and collaborative. “Social Tagging” refers to the practice of publicly labeling or categorizing resources in a shared, online environment.” (Trant, 2008, p.1)

When a number of people contribute to the process, the collective intelligence is at work. This collaborative effort, most clearly seen in the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, operates on the premise that the wisdom of the many is always telling and often true. It is certainly an influential idea, The Horizon Report (2008) states, “In coming years, we will see educational applications for both explicit collective intelligence – evidenced in projects like the Wikipedia and in community tagging- and implicit collective intelligence.”

A number of museums, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn museum and The Indianapolis Museum of Art have instituted systems of social tagging. Users are encouraged to look at works of art in the online collection, then to contribute their own search terms to the tags describing each piece. In some cases there is a game involved, with points awarded for the number of pieces tagged.

Tagging offers some very practical advantages. The data can be used for various research purposes into viewer demographics. The steve.museum Tibetan Study was well crafted. The metadata creates new and intuitive search patterns between objects. In a purely pragmatic fashion, it helps organize a large inventory of images.

The most interesting revelation to arise from museum tagging, however, was the dichotomy between the language of the user based taxonomy, (or “folksonomy”) and the terms commonly employed by professional community of art critics. A 2007 NY Times article asks, “But can the public be trusted to tag art? Will curators let them?

The Metropolitan Museum of Art ran a test in fall 2005 in which volunteers supplied keywords for 30 images of paintings, sculpture and other artwork. 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.” (OConnall, 2007)

Apparently the museum professionals and the collective intelligence do not share quite the same vocabulary. However, responding to art does not require a specific vocabulary. For example, as Michael Hemment says in his blog, “Using a folksonomy can be a highly-effective means of capturing the “visual language” of younger students.” (2007) The process has removed the discussion of art from the realm of the art professionals and placed it in the hands of the viewer, enabling them to construct their own meaning, and fostering a sense of connection. More importantly, it affords the opportunity to construct personal meaning.

Educause Learning Consortium. (2008). The Horizon Report [Brochure]. Stanford. CT:

Hemment, M (2007, May, 14). Tagging Museum Collections. Retrieved March 22, 2009, from ResearchForward Web site: http://researchforward.wordpress.com/2007/05/14/tagging-museum-collections/

Lilcalzi OConnell, P (March 28, 2007). One Picture, 1,000 Tags . New York Times, Retrieved 3/17/2009, from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/28/arts/artsspecial/28social.html?_r=1

Seeing Tibetan art. Retrieved March 22, 2009, from steve.museum Web site: http://www.seeingtibetanart.org/

Trant, J (2008).Studying social tagging and folksonomy:A review and framework. Journal of Digital Information.

Museum Tagging

What is museum tagging?

"The teaching implications of tagging are enormous. If we allow our students to begin assigning their own significance to the evidence we introduce them to, I think we'll find that they make meaning from this evidence in ways that we couldn't imagine."

http://edwired.org/archives/2006/03/subverting_the.html

This statement really struck me. It has me thinking of other ways tagging could be used to help students construct meaning, not just in the art classroom, but across the curriculum.

Link to tagging entry in my resource blog.

Delicious

The clearest and most delightful use of social bookmarking that I've found is its ability for to help me keep track of the resources I find in the course of my surfing. It makes it so easy to store and organize data - just a click on the toolbar and a few typed words, and I never have to wonder where I saw that excellent article, or that great blog with all the amazing links.

Additionally, as with movie or book reviewers I've come to trust, there are other taggers who's taste in websites I appreciate, who's tags I check on to see if they've updated. I don't really check the most popular tags, though I've heard that some people do, I find it's more useful to me to follow people who are interested in the same things that I am.

I took a class in interactive narrative last semester, and we used social bookmarking in a cooperative project. It was an extremely creative use of the medium, and it was fun and inspiring. I'd definitely use it with a class. All the students started on the same website, and bookmarked an image. Then they had to surf, by direct linking, to another website and chose an image there to bookmark, and so on, until there were 30 bookmarks. Those 30 were given to a fellow student, and that student had to create a narrative, written or visual, from the bookmarked images. My images are under the tag 251 project, and my partner, Spencer Hargiss, created the most amazingly funny video from them. I will post it here, if I can get his permission.



My question would be, in what other ways could one use social bookmarking in lesson plans? I'm trying to think of ideas that are unexpected and playful, as well as taking advantage of the obvious peer to peer learning potential.