Another paper from the Steve researchers has gone online and is generating interesting discussions. It elaborates on the content of an earlier summary podcast. To be presented at ICHIM07 the paper describes some of the emerging patterns in tagging behaviour in the different interface trials.
Promising results from early prototype analysis showed that users could contribute significant numbers of new terms, reflecting new concepts (Trant, 2006b). Indeed up to 90% of the terms that users contributed were not present in the documentation of the works as provided by the museums even though those works provided by the museums had quite rich records. Significant numbers of new terms provided by more than one or two visitors, revealed that users see, and presumably recall, some details of images that are not explicitly documented by professionals, thus suggesting some scope for using these terms to aid in discovery.
These preliminary results are holding up in our more formal experiments. Of the tags assigned to all works during Term Set 1 (March 27– July 11, 2007), 76.5% (7,973 of 10,418) were not found in museum documentation.
To offer some data from our own work, here are some recent comparative statistics from the Powerhouse Museum’s collection database. We have generated these statistics against all our tags as well as separately for those objects tagged with our ‘bulk tagger‘ which draws an audience from readers of this blog and other museum professionals.
Overall tagging behaviour
Basic statistics excluding bulk tags
Total tags added – 6,749
Total unique tag words/phrases – 5,044
Number of objects tagged – 3,980
Top ten most used tags:
value – 35
blue – 34
chinese – 28
glass – 25
price – 24
green – 23
vase – 20
japanese – 20
white – 19
silver – 19
Tag to museum terminology relationships:
Tag terms that pre-exist in object description field – 1,637 (32.5%)
Tag terms that pre-exist anywhere in full object record – 1,911 (37.9%)
Tag terms that match taxonomic object or subject classification – 551 (10.9%)
Bulk tagger tagging behaviour (started July 2007)
Basic statistics
Total bulk tags added – 815
Total unique bulk tags – 563
Number of objects bulk tagged – 286
Top ten most used tags:
olympics – 11
australia – 9
costume – 7
floral – 6
flowers – 6
plate – 6
vase – 6
coin – 5
copper – 5
decorative – 5
Tag to museum terminology relationships:
Bulk tag terms that pre-exist in object description field – 267 (47.4%)
Bulk tag terms that pre-exist anywhere in full object record – 316 (56.1%)
Tag terms that match taxonomic object or subject classification – 125 (22.2%)
In the Steve results 23.5% of terms matched terms already in the object documentation. But in the Powerhouse example, our figures are significantly greater especially if we look at the entire object record (not just the basic description), and interestingly even more so amongst the bulk taggers (ie. you, the museum professionals). My initial feeling is that this result is because of the compartatively higher level of documentation for object records in the Powerhouse collection compared to the average for an art museum collection. This might indicate that whilst there is some degree of ‘semantic gap’ bridging going on here, there is also a content issue. Interestingly, within our collection there is even a reasonable correlation between object tags and formal thesaurus terms.
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