Social Tagging of Art. What a brilliant concept. That’s STEVE.
I first heard a presentation about the Steve project several years ago at Metropolitan New York Library Council. The presenters said that the name “steve” had no meaning and was just pulled out of the hat. Can’t help thinking, though, that S(ocial) T(agging) had something to do with it. In any case STEVE: The Museum Social Tagging Project continues and the site has evolved and improved.
Steve is “a collaboration of museum professionals and others who are interested in using social tagging to enhance access to museum collections and engage visitors with collections. We build open source software (the steve tagger), advocate for social tagging methods, and do research into the effectiveness of tagging. You can read much more about our work, which is funded, in part, by grants from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services, at www.steve.museum.”
The online Steve tagger can be used by anyone. Thousands of works have been contributed for this purpose by 17 major art museums including the Metropolitan, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Tate Modern, and the Dallas Museum of Art. Several of these museum have installed interfaces on site for museum visitors to try out tagging.
In the Objects tab each is represented by a thumbnail and I love that you can select “infinite” and have the application load thumbnails (13 across on my browser) which just keep coming. (see above) Painting, drawings, sculpture, decorative objects, text, textiles, photography, are all included. All periods. All parts of the world. It’s a treasure trove. If you are patient you can see all objects in Steve on a single screen. (At least they were continuing to load for a full hour after I pulled the page up with no sign of abating.)
In the Terms tab the tags assigned by users can be viewed in a list or in a tag cloud with the words you personally have added highlighted in red. It’s hard for me to believe that the ones listed constitute the full list, but but there is no indication otherwise.
You can browse by the tags, by collection, and by “set,” a fairly eclectic group that includes “I’m in the mood for love” and “WTF?.” Here’s an image from the latter:
Once you hone in on a particular object it you can see it in larger formats, which while not full screen, are more generous than at other actual museum sites. The museum’s metadata for the object is also available, and you can look at “More object like this” and see what sets it is included in. If you register (free) you can add tags of your own, save collections, and make them private or public.
Some of the tagging is quite object focused: tree, chair, bread, cane, etc. Some simply repeats information already available in the metadata, artist, period, or object type. But many tags aim to convey other aspects of the visual experience, feelings (graceful, scary), and associated impressions (circular, swirly), for instance.
The tagging system does not allow you to use the conventional feature of enclosing a multi word phrase in quotes in order to save it as a phrase. So you will find a lot of tags in which several words are strung together: “purplerug”, for example, not “purple rug”. In some cases this may be due to a lack of understanding on the part of the user of how tagging works. But even someone who knows can’t do it right. This seems to be a pretty critical function for a tool intended to tag visual items. How else to apply an adjective to a single object in the image or to a part of it?
In any event some of the resulting tags are are bit unusual:
- anactresslongforgotten
- asiflookingfromawindow
- asifyouwereclimbingup
- harvest
- hassheeverkilledanyone
- wannagointheblackdoor
- white
- whiteandblueporcelainbowl
- whitebarn
- whitepigmentonlyatcollar
But that is part of the point. To see how non-experts identify images and what kinds of things they focus on, and what sorts of terms they use.
Tagging has become familiar to uses through Flickr and other tools. A sensitivity to what terms help with findability is growing in the average person. Learning how well that translates to the world of art objects, and how it complements traditional metadata, will be interesting to see.
It is a revealing experience to seek for words that convey the contents of image. The inadequacy of words becomes so clear. On the other hand, by persisting in finding every descriptive word that comes to mind, one actually sees so much more.
Steve has produced a number of reports evaluating the project, has a wiki, and provides more background information. A three-year National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS) funding Steve in Action: Social Tagging Tools and Methods Applied, a project to further develop the Steve tagging application, is scheduled to conclude in October, 2011.
{ 0 comments }
