Steve in Action: Social Tagging Tools and Methods Applied

www.steve.museum steve@steve.museum
Steve in Action
Social Tagging Tools and
Methods Applied

Who is Steve?
• Steve is a collaborative project, formed
in 2005, dedicated to exploring the
effectiveness of social tagging for
accessing art museum collections
online and engaging audiences.

Who is Steve?
• Founded in 2005 as a volunteer effort
• Funded as a research project by an IMLS
National Leadership Grant in 2006
• Re-funded by IMLS for research activities in
2008, as well as implementation work

Chipstone Foundation
Cleveland Museum of Art
Denver Art Museum
Guggenheim Museum
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Indianapolis Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
Minnesota Digital Library
Rubin Museum of Art
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Smithsonian American Art Museum
UCLA Graduate School of Education
and Information Studies
Walker Art Center
Funding: Institute of Museum and Library
Services
Listserv Participants: 350 active members
Archives and Museum Informatics
Susan Chun, Independent Consultant
New Media Consortium
Taxonomy Strategies
Think Design
University of Maryland, CLiMB Project

http://www.steve.museu
m

Why study social tagging?
Every participant had a different answer
• Can tagging help users find art more
easily?
• Can tagging change the way users look
at and engage with art?
• Can tagging help museums understand
what visitors see and understand?

From: J. P. xxxxxx@xxxxxx.com
Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2006 11:24:43 -0700
To: timeline@metmuseum.org
Subject: Looking for a painting
Please help:
I have been looking on and off for years for this painting. The
painting is of a very well dressed renaissance man standing in a
room (a library) in front of him on a table is a large hour glass. The
painting has very rich colors. I have talked to a lot of people and
they have said they have seen this painting but can't remember its
name or the name of the artist.
Could you please use your resources to find this painting?
What isn’t the user finding?

Why a research project?
• What conditions yield the most useful
and accurate descriptions of artworks?
• What interfaces provide the most
engaging user experience?
• Who should tag?
• Which works should be tagged?

steve’s Tools

The steve tagger: an open-source,
configurable tag collection environment

Available for download at SourceForge.net

The steve term review tool: a tool for
reviewing and annotating tags

The steve reporting suite: allowing us to
review and analyze the data

Raw data from the research available

2006-08 Research Results
Download the 10MB file in the Research area of
www.steve.museum

Some stats from the
research:
11 Participating Museums
1,782 Works of Art in the Research
36,981 Tags collected
2,017 Users who tagged

A Few Highlights
88% of tags were useful
If you found this work using this term
would you be surprised?
Museum professionals
found most tags useful

A Few Highlights
Tags are different than museum
documentation:
86% of all tags not found in label copy

A Few Highlights
Tags are almost always useful when they are
assigned two or more times

A Few Highlights
Institutional Affiliation Matters
• Users invited to tag by The Metropolitan
Museum of Art were 4 times as productive
• Multi-Institution Tagger: 22 tags / user
• Single-Institution Tagger: 82 tags / user

Q: When you visited steve.museum, did you want
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
don't remember
to see your own previously applied tags
to search the system for sets of works
similar to ones you had seen before
to see if new art was available
to be exposed to works other
than what you had seen before
to see what tags others gave
to art you had also tagged
to experience tagging art
Public
MMA

Q: Why did you tag?
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
don't remember
to connect with others
so that I could find works again later
other (please specify)
to learn about art
to improve search for other users
for fun
to help museums document art work
Public
MMA

Q: Do you think you might tag more if your local art
museum asked you to help them in this way?
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
no response
no
not sure
yes
Public
MMA

Tag Contributor Comment
“I love, love, love this. I feel like I am in school again
learning and contributing to this. It has become a hobby,
I try to do some whenever I have a quiet moment.
I look forward to doing it. I am so excited to be a part of it.”

Tag Contributor Comment
“1. It's fun, interesting, educational, a “trip”.
2. Makes me feel I have a stake in the collections.
3. Delightfully self-aggrandizing.”

Steve in Action:
Social Tagging
Tools and Methods
Applied
A demonstration grant focusing on
encouraging and enabling
widespread use of tagging in
museums, and in extending the
functionality of the steve tool set

A research grant focusing on the
usefulness of combining
computational linguistics and
tagging to assign weights or trust
to a set of objects tagged by experts
T3: Text, Tagging,
Trust

Networked information still mirrors physical museum reality in many ways. It is
still not
possible to search art museum collections as a whole; one must separately visit
each museum Web site. The information presented is structured according to
museum goals and objectives – which may not mesh with those of the user. The
language used is often highly specialized and technical, rendering resources
inaccessible or incomprehensible.
An on-line work of art or other museum object may be embedded in an
exhibition or other interpretive context with a point-of-view not shared by the
user. Or inversely, the object may only appear in a database, completely de-
contextualized and without the meaning that comes from its cultural context
(for example, seeing it alongside other artifacts of the same culture, or viewing
how it was used).

- View assigned tags (both MoMA
and Visitor tags)
- Add tags from available tags
- [vote on existing tags - not possible
in phase one]

Goals for the program:
The teens will:
1.Learn about educational practices within museums
2.Learn about website design, architecture and functionality
3.Create an educational proposal for reaching a specific audience both online
and in the galleries
4.Implement the proposal
Goals for the site:
1. Learn about the Museum’s programs, events and collections
2. Expand minds
3. Inspire creativity

• Can tagging serve as a way to help teens/MoMA visitors find
unexpected connections between objects in MoMA’s collection?
• How can we use the tags to help deepen teens/MoMA visitors
understanding of the objects?
• Can tagging be constructed as a social activity for teens/MoMA
visitors?
• How will tagging on the teen site relate to tagging on MoMA’s
site (when and if we do that)?
• Will tagging and sorting by tags help make objects in MoMA’s
collection more accessible and relevant to the teens?
• Will tagging give us new insights to our teen audience and how
to best reach them?
• Could tags be used to help teens learn some art history?

Questions or ideas?
steve@steve.museum
Twitter: steve_museum

Steve in Action: Social Tagging Tools and Methods Applied

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Steve in Action: Social Tagging Tools and Methods Applied