Folksonomies in Museums

LIS 653 Knowledge OrganizationKathleen Dowling

Dana HartNoreen Whysel

Folksonomies in Museums

IntroductionKathleen Dowling

Entry Points

No title

No author

No knowledge of Art History

How Do Users Find This Item?

Campbell's Soup Cans

Andy Warhol 

How Do Users Find This Item?

melting landscape

pocket

watch

branch

abstract

watch face

darkness

melting watch

Impact of Social Tagging…

…Improving Online Search

Folksonomies in Museums

What is a Folksonomy?Noreen Whysel

Folksonomy The user-created bottom-up

categorical structure development with an emergent thesaurus.

The result of personal free tagging of information and objects (anything with a URL) for one's own retrieval.

The tagging is done in a social environment (usually shared and open to others).

Folksonomy is created from the act of tagging by the person consuming the information.

Source: http://vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html, Vander Wal, Thomas (June 24, 2004). Message posted to http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/aifia-members

Thomas Vander WalPrincipal and Senior Consultant, InfoCloud Solutions

Founder, Information Architecture Institute

Folksonomy “Mass Amateurization of Web Publishing”

“We have gone past a critical mass of connectivity between people that has introduced a new revolutionary ability to communicate, collaborate and share goods online.

“To respond to these increased informational and exchange needs, new communication models are emerging and producing an incredible amount of distributed information that information management professionals, information architects, librarians and knowledge workers at large need to link, aggregate, and organize in order to extract knowledge.

“The issue is whether the traditional organizational schemes used so far are suitable to address the classification needs of fast-proliferating, new information sources or if, to achieve this goal, better aggregation and concept matching tools are required.

“Folksonomies attempt to provide a solution to this issue, by introducing an innovative distributed approach based on social classification.”

-Emanuele Quintarelli, Folksonomies: power to the people http://www.iskoi.org/doc/folksonomies.htm

Folksonomy vs TaxonomyFolksonomy Unstructured Personal Free and open Social

Taxonomy Structured Hierarchical Controlled Defines relationships

folks·on·o·my [fohk-son-uh-mee] noun,plural folks·on·o·mies.noun Computers.a classification system derived from user-generated electronic tags or keywords that annotate and describe online content.

tax·on·o·my [tak-son-uh-mee]noun, plural tax·on·o·mies.1. the science or technique of classification.2. a classification into ordered categories.3. Biology. the science dealing with the description, identification, naming, and classification of organisms.

Source: Retrieved from http://dictionary.reference.com/

Tagging Identify/Label

Hello my name is… Suitcase tag Price tag

Describe What color? How big? Who made it? What does it cost?

Tagging on the Web Categorize

Curator Top-Down

Category Directory Path SKU

Control Authority Files Metadata Systems Controlled Vocabulary Thesaurus Taxonomy Ontology

Find User Bottom-Up

Keyword Search term Facet

Re-find Folksonomy Social Bookmarking Hashtag

Private Use vs. Public GoodPrivate Tag Personal Recall

Bookmarks (Deli.cio.us) Twitter hashtags Search terms Language of the User

Public Tag Group Recall

Blog categories Formalized hashtags Facets Language of the curator

Source: Weinberger, David (2007). Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. New York, NY: Henry Holt & Company.

Social Tagging: Del.icio.us

Social Tagging: Flickr

Social Tagging at Museums What is the best way for museum website users

to discover works online?

What language does the average website user use to describe an image compared to language used by an art curator?

Before we get to this, Dana will present on traditional taxonomies used by museums.

Folksonomies in Museums

Museum TaxonomiesDana Hart

How Do Art Museums Create Taxonomies? Curators determine to which curatorial

department an object belongs.

The department further classifies the object with appropriate descriptors.

These descriptive terms are usually taken from a controlled vocabulary; understanding the vocabulary is the key to understanding the taxonomy.

Authority Controls Controlled vocabularies are selected words or

phrases used to tag works.

Getty is an established source of authority control for language.

ICONCLASS is a specialized taxonomy of art subjects.

Example: British Museum

If there is no authority control that fits a museum’s needs, they can create their own descriptors.

The British Museum created their own taxonomy that has three “top terms”: organic, inorganic, and man-made.

Taxonomies: A Hierarchy

Organic Inorganic Processed Material

Man-made Natural State

Metals Synthetics

Plastics FabricsBronze Silver

The Victorious Athlete Charles V

Managing Taxonomies Museums purchase software that allows them to

catalog, publish and manage their collection

IT department works with curators, data managers and conservators to determine which data fields to include/how to format.

Maintenance is constant.

Example: The Museum System (TMS)

The Museum System is a collections management software.

TMS is open architecture, so collections data can be integrated with other management systems.

“Light box” display mode on TMS

Taxonomies informing web galleries

Museums use their taxonomy and reverse the structure to make a more user friendly “bottom up” approach.

The Victorious Athlete Charles VBalance

Bronze

The West WindDianna

Marble

Processed Material

Pros Of Formal Taxonomies Taxonomies serves the needs of the museum

workers.

Top down approach allows for strict control.

Authority control language insures consistency with other institutions.

Cons of Formal Taxonomies Taxonomies don’t serve the needs of

visitors/users.

Exploring is difficult to do when trapped in a strict classification system.

Users who are not familiar with the authority control terms/descriptors will have a hard time searching for specific pieces.

Folksonomies in Museums

Programmers and Social TaggingIn Museums Kathleen Dowling

Bridging the Semantic Gap Social tagging allows users to create a path to

information using familiar search terminology.

A social tagging interface builds a sense of community among museum users.

Tagging-related projects develop relationships between museums and their communities, and provide added value to museum collections.

Thoroughly tested tagging projects encourage more traffic to the museum's website and inevitably to the museum itself.

Example: Cleveland Museum of Art Online Information retrieval tool called Help

Others Find this Object, which utilized social tagging.

Now in use at the Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Rochester.

Requires users to think of their social tags in an organized, Taxonomic way.

“We're looking for simple, everyday terms that describe what you see…as well as more complex terminology related to the work's art historical or iconographical context. “

“subject:art techniques:genre scenes “

Example: Cleveland Museum of Art

Example: AMARA Online collections search interface that helps art

enthusiasts who wish to explore online art collections, but may be unable to effectively utilize taxonomic keywords due to a lack of art historical expertise or knowledge of art terminology.

AMARA helps users determine what types of art they are seeking by answering a few simple questions about their current beliefs and feelings.

Example: AMARA

Example: Indianapolis Museum of Art

User Interface Museums have previously been inspired by social

tagging applications such as Flickr and del.icio.us.

Programmers need to understand how to encourage users to continue to supply terminology.

Users should be able to login to a profile or account which tracks their activities.

Users engage in on-going relations with the institution.

Users want to continue their work from one login session to the next.

Example: steve.museum A social tagging system with a great deal of

variability in its interface.

Supports individual user logins.

Records user details, including email, for future contact.

Allows museum to record the 'environment' (interface settings) within which new tags were assigned.

Example: Whitney for Kids Allows kids to collect and organize artwork in

child-friendly version of the same content management system used by Whitney staff.

Puts children in the shoes of the curator – intellectually digesting the artwork and encouraging children to assign meaning and value to a piece.

“A Google eyed dog”

Example: Whitney for Kids

Example: Tagasauris National Endowment for the Humanities Grant

was awarded to:

The Museum of the City of New York and Tagasauris, a NYC technology company

to improve the Museum's digital record annotation capabilities with:

open-sourced ontologies and crowd-sourced workers

The Future for Art Museum Folksonomies Curators need to determine how to utilize this

new folksonomy alongside their own strict taxonomic vocabularies.

Further explore how to engage people, keep them engaged and foster communities of users who share common interests (genealogists, hobbyists, art-enthusiasts).

Use cyber communities to build real communities: research into creating this dynamic will be integrated into a museum’s approach to its public programming. 

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Folksonomies in Museums

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