VIEWER TAGGING IN ART MUSEUMS: COMPARISONS TO CONCEPTS AND VOCABULARIES OF ART MUSEUM VISITORS

As one important experiment in the social or user-generated classification of online cultural heritage resources collections, art museums are leading the effort to elicit keyword descriptions of artwork images from online museum visitors. The motivations for having online viewers— presumably largely non-art-specialists—describe art images are (a) to generate keywords for image and object records in museum information retrieval systems in a cost-effective way and (b) to engage online visitors with the artworks and with each other by inviting visitors to express themselves and share their descriptions of artworks. This paper explores the question of how effective non-specialist art keyworders can be in capturing (“tagging”) potentially useful concepts and terms for use in art information retrieval systems. To do this, the paper compares evidence from art museum visitor studies which describe how non-specialist art viewers react to and describe artworks and use museum-supplied information in their initial encounters with artworks. A theoretical model of artwork interpretation derived from art museum visitor research provides a framework with which to examine both the activity and the products of artwork tagging for image and information retrieval.

[1]  Heather Dunn.  Collection Level Description - the Museum Perspective , 2000, D Lib Mag..

[2]  Catherine Stainton,et al.  Voices and Images: Making Connections Between Identity and Art , 2003 .

[3]  Judit Bar-Ilan,et al.  Structured versus unstructured tagging: a case study , 2008, Online Inf. Rev..

[4]  Karen M. Drabenstott,et al.  Browse and Search Patterns in a Digital Image Database , 2004, Information Retrieval.

[5]  Sara Shatford,et al.  Analyzing the Subject of a Picture: A Theoretical Approach , 1986 .

[6]  Douglas Cunliffe Daniel Tudhope,et al.  The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia , 1995 .

[8]  Catherine Gordon,et al.  Patterns of User Queries in an ICONCLASS Database , 1996 .

[9]  A. Martin,et al.  American material culture : the shape of the field , 1999 .

[10]  Hugh Griffin,et al.  The democratic indexing of images , 1996, New Rev. Hypermedia Multim..

[11]  Mary Gates.  VIEWER TAGGING IN ART MUSEUMS: COMPARISONS TO CONCEPTS AND VOCABULARIES OF ART MUSEUM VISITORS , 2006 .

[12]  K. Markey.  Computer-Assisted Construction of a Thematic Catalog of Primary and Secondary Subject Matter , 1983 .

[13]  Martha Kellogg Smith.  Art information use and needs of non-specialists : evidence in art museum visitor studies , 2006 .

[14]  K. Crowley,et al.  Learning conversations in museums , 2002 .

[15]  P. McManus.  Oh, Yes, They Do: How Museum Visitors Read Labels and Interact with Exhibit Texts , 1989 .

[16]  Layna White.  Interpretation and Representation: The Who, Why, What, and How of Subject Access in Museums , 2002, Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America.

[17]  Patricia Harpring,et al.  Categories for the description of works of art , 2007 .

[18]  David Bearman,et al.  Social Terminology Enhancement through Vernacular Engagement: Exploring Collaborative Annotation to Encourage Interaction with Museum Collections , 2005, D Lib Mag..

[19]  Katherine Jones-Garmil.  The wired museum : emerging technology and changing paradigms , 1997 .

[21]  Peter G. B. Enser,et al.  Progress in Documentation Pictorial Information Retrieval , 1995, J. Documentation.

[22]  Alison Gilchrest.  Factors Affecting Controlled Vocabulary Usage in Art Museum Information Systems , 2003, Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America.

[23]  Abigail Housen.  Three Methods for Understanding Museum Audiences , 1987 .

[24]  J. Trant.  Investigating social tagging and folksonomy in art museums with steve.museum , 2006 .

[25]  Karen Markey.  Subject access to visual resources collections: a model for computer construction of thematic catalogs , 1986 .

[26]  Jennifer Trant,et al.  Exploring the potential for social tagging and folksonomy in art museums: Proof of concept , 2006, New Rev. Hypermedia Multim..

[27]  L. L. Duke.  The Getty Center for Education in the Arts. , 1983 .