Social classification and folksonomy in art museums: Early data from the steve.museum tagger prototype
(2006) Social classification and folksonomy in art museums: Early data from the steve.museum tagger prototype. In Furner, Jonathan and Tennis, Joseph T., Eds. Proceedings 17th Workshop of the American Society for Information Science and Technology Special Interest Group in Classification Research 17, Austin, TX.
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Abstract
The collections of art museums have been assembled over hundreds of years and described, organized and classified according to traditions of art historical research and discourse. Art museums, in their role as curators and interpreters of the cultural record, have developed standards for the description of works of art (such as the Categories for the Description of Works of Art, CDWA) that emphasize the physical nature of art as artefact, the authorial role of the creator, the temporal and cultural context of creation and ownership, and the scholarly significance of the work over time. Collections managers have recorded conservation, exhibition, loan and publication history, along with significant volumes of internal documentation of acquisition and storage, that support the custody and care of artefacts of significant cultural value. But the systems of documentation and classification that support the professional discourse of art history and the management of museum collections have failed to represent the interests, perspectives or passions of those who visit [use?] museum collections, both on-site and online. As museums move to reflect the breadth of their audiences and the diversity of their perspectives, so must museum documentation change to reflect concerns other than the traditionally art historical and museological. Social tagging offers a direct way for museums to learn what museum-goers see in works of art, what they judge as significant and where they find or make meaning. Wi thin the steve collaboration(http://www.steve.museum), a group of art museums is collectively exploring the role of social tagging and studying the resulting folksonomy (Bearman & Trant, 2005; Chun, Cherry, Hiwiller, Trant, & Wyman, 2006; Trant & Wyman, 2006). Analysis of terms collected in the prototype steve tagger suggests that social tagging of art museum objects can in fact augment museum documentation with unique access points not found in traditional cataloguing. Terms collected through social tagging tools are being compared to museum documentation, to establish the actual contributions made by naïve users to the accessibility of art museum collections and to see if social classification provides a way to bridge the semantic gap between art historians and art museums’ publics.
| EPrint Type: | Conference Paper |
|---|---|
| Keywords: | social tagging, folksonomy, information access, art museums, classification, research methodology, museum collections documentation |
| Subjects: | Museums Classification Digital Humanities |
| ID Code: | 1728 |
| Deposited On: | 12 December 2007 |
| Alternative Locations: | http://www.archimuse.com/papers/asist-CR-steve-0611.pdf |
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