This link has been bookmarked by 17 people . It was first bookmarked on 08 Jul 2006, by Bruce Mason.
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27 Jan 15
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Steve.museum: An Ongoing Experiment in Social Tagging, Folksonomy, and Museums
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socially-focussed data collection strategies seem to have potential for museums struggling to make their collections more accessible and to build communities of interest around their holdings. But little is known about the terminology that visitors to museum sites might contribute or how best to obtain both useful terms and on-going social involvement in tagging museum collections.
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Keywords: Social tagging, folksonomy, vocabulary, terminology, museum cataloguing, retrieval, open source, art documentation, social computing, accessibility
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Museums have an opportunity to enhance user experience and to experiment with n
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w strategies fo
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user engagement that
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uilds community and attract new audiences.
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e emergence of the Web offered museums an opportunity to present more of their collections and context to a larger, more geographically-dispersed audience than ever before. The early years of publishing for this broader audience did not, however, result in a significant change in the nature of the museum’s engagement with its viewer: in the early days of the Web, museums continued to publish “curated,” largely linear on-line exhibitions an
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educational materials.
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e have come to realize that both models for presentation of on-line information about our collections – highly authored, linear exhibitions and educational materials, and un-interpreted collections databases – are inherently limiting.
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This is one of the reasons that social tagging, where access points are supplied and shared on-line by the general public, may turn out to be an attractive solution to some of the problems of access.
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Tagging can also become part of the museum’s tool-set for fostering and maintaining interactions with teachers and students, or volunteers and docents.
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hat distinguishes tagging as a form of visitor engagement from other kinds of “interactive” museum programs is that the impetus lies not with the institution but with the individual; the visitor completes the experience.
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e’ve identified a series of questions about social tagging and folksonomy in the museum. These questions are focused on getting, using, and understanding tagging data, and the potential social impacts of tagging. Central to this shared agenda has been an underlying research method that breaks down the different components of the experience, such as methods for building data sets, customizable front-ends, and plug-in architectures for the back-end and analysis. All of these different facets become variables that we can control and combine in different iterations of a tagging tool to see what experience best benefits from different permutations.
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Social tagging applications have evolved in two distinct ways. Tag servers, such as del.icio.us, citeUlike.com, PennTags, or dogear (Millen, Feinberg, & Kerr, 2005) store data separately from the source which is being tagged. A tag server can interface with a museum’s existing data servers, and offer tagging on museum Web sites where on-line visitors already exist. Centralized systems such as flickr store tags and data on the same system, and require users to come there to participate.
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We need to understand the pros and cons of each of these implementation paradigms and appreciate how they influence the experience for individuals, communities and the museum. Different implementation models are being explored in the prototypes now under development, with both a shared steve application and a single institution steve application now in beta
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The interface experience is a particularly critical issue because variations in it create the plethora of experiences that we hope to support.
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We need to understand how to best manage the relationships between tags and museum resources (both to create an experimental data set for analysis and to produce data that is useful to support museum functions.)
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hile one museum may simply see tagging as a method of supporting a better form of search, another may want to create open-ended data sets that visitors can reuse and repurpose in unimagined ways.
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These goals, while not necessarily exclusive, may require different implementations for each experience to feel uniquely good, rather than comprehensively bland.
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Two working groups – one focused on the front-end (interface) questions and the other on the back-end (database) questions – considered system needs in light of questions being formalized by a working group on the research agenda, and developed specifications for tools to be built.
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he front-end working group described a fairly complex interface environment, where users could select images they wanted to tag and could choose the layout of the interface from two or more preset designs. Users should also be able to leave, return, and restart a session where they left off. Further, images needed to be filtered so that users would never be presented with repeat images to tag (Cataloguing by Crowd Working Group, 2005).
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Creating tools to support the term collection, user experience, and data analysis functions is expected to be an iterative process.
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To date, two prototypes have been built based on the specifications developed by the Cataloguing by Crowd working groups.
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- Zoomable images (to allow examination of images)
- Varying the number of image thumbnails (to focus attention)
- Museum-made groups to tag (pre-defined, related)
- User created group to tag (search-based, personal)
- Users pre-selection of images to tag (another personalization option)
- Essay answer (long text might surface different content)
- Category prompt (suggesting categories might improve consistency)
- User defined category entry (users might identify axes of interest)
The following functionality was identified as likely to influence the quality of folksonomic terminology, and therefore to be explored first.
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12 Nov 14
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05 Oct 11
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05 Dec 10
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09 Jan 08
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29 Aug 07
karli whitesteve.museum social tagging project. Active participation of viewers/visitors. encourage use for research in schools - participation in activity.
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07 Aug 07
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25 Jun 07
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14 Apr 07
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04 Apr 07
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08 Mar 07
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11 Feb 07
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21 May 06
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