Dissertation Week 5

Digital Museums and Diverse Cultural Knowledges:  Moving Past the Traditional Catalog


This article is about the idea of Museum 2.0.  Museums have tried to move beyond the one curatorial voice that has traditionally been presented, mostly by opening up their engagement with the public to panel discussions, presentations and talks.  However, the museum catalog has become more and more standardised.  Web 2.0 may offer the potential to reverse this trend with more input from the public in the form of tagging, blogging and social computing.  Cultural institutions should use Web 2.0 technologies to allow multiple, and conflicting perspectives, which would allow for further engagement.  Contemporary museum studies acknowledges:  1)  reality, truth and knowledge are relative 2)  people come to know things through a social process which is generated by discussion and perception that the topic is thought well of my a trusted community 3)  each conversation about a topic is a contribution to other ongoing and simultaneous discussions in over-lapping networks 4)  each sequence of knowledge takes the form of a narrative, and are endless 5)  knowledge is knowledge of/about objects, which are things that the user knows (knowledge is embodied within objects), and generation of knowledge requires engagement.  The challenges to standardisation are:  a)  the effective silencing of the voices who cannot or do not contribute to the "expert consensus"  b)  the reproduction of biases, prejudices and other assumptions held by the few who do contribute.  Cultural institutions face a challenge is showing an object as a representation of a larger body of knowledge, and how that object is grounded in local knowledge.  People from different communities may describe the same object with different concepts and ideas, and all of these are important to the museum experience.  Many case studies are shown for how increasing engagement and allowing more diverse voices can benefit cultural institutions.

Implications


This paper helps to show that further engagement with the public is beneficial for the museums to complete some of the goals of the new museology.  With new technologies, it is no longer explicitly necessary to standardise all metadata into specific formats in order to make the objects accessible.  It is possible to allow multiple and conflicting metadata to represent the object from different community perspectives.  Instead of creating chaos, this could help the public to find the objects easier.

Dissertation Week 3

Blobgects:  Digital Museum Catalogs and Diverse User Communities


The article in primarily about how museums can more effectively engage with their audiences using Web 2.0. It posits that simply adding Web 2.0 applications to the existing museum catalogue is insufficient because that expects the users to use and learn the museum's specialist terminology, and effectively negates the purpose of the new museology.  In effect, it does little to prevent the museum from being a gatekeeper of knowledge or education, and only further engagement will help to break that barrier.  Basically, digital museums should do more to allow many classifications of objects "according to the different narratives and uses to which they are connected".  Museums should thus allow many expert account, and to allow more direct engagement with the objects.  The article also states that the main barrier to further engagement is the museum catalogue itself, which requires specialist terms to search, and doesn't allow users to manipulate the content of the records.  The ability of users to engage with the catalogue improves their experience of the catalogue.  Three ways to do this are to allow uncontrolled tagging of objects; allowing users to follow the tags of other users; and providing visual representations of objects, not just verbal ones.

The study that was done for the article suggests that plain language descriptions are needed for objects in order for people to be able to effectively interact with the catalogue.  Part of the problem was that the metadata for many objects did not include much of the cultural context of the objects.  Users also seem to need a starting point in order to add comments to an object, so "seeding" may be important.  However, of more importance, is that users are much interested in feeling that their contribution is valued and welcomed, which helps them to feel motivated to add tags.  Users are also very reluctant to tag catalogue entries without images.  Key lessons from the study:  the power of narratological tags; diverse users with diverse inputs add meaning to the online catalog; tagging must fit within a discursive conversation; the power of images; blogs versus tags.

Implications
For the purpose of my dissertation, it is important to note that simply adding a tagging feature is not likely to provide much of a benefit.  Also, only objects with pictures are likely to be tagged, or commented upon.  Users need to have a free form ability to add to an object, and standard metadata formats are too specialised to offer the average user much help.  In order to gain the most benefit from the users, objects will need to have some seeding of description in order to prompt the user to add tags and comments.  The more comments and tags an object has, the more likely it is to draw more comments and tags.

Descriptive metadata is a reasonably broad realm for museum objects, and could accommodate less specialist knowledge than other types of metadata.  It also allows for creating cultural contexts, so the users should have a gateway to the object through those tags.

Additions:


From a kind person at the British Museum I also received some very useful links:

http://www.humanitiescrowds.org/
which gives presentations on the topic of crowdsourcing in the humanities

http://www.delicious.com/stacks/view/KMzXC2
a set of links on crowdsourcing in the humanities

http://openobjects.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/frequently-asked-questions-about.html
a nice summary of crowdsourcing in the humanities

Dissertation Week 1

Art Images Online:  Leveraging Social Tagging and Language for Browsing

This small article offers a solution to the problems inherent in tagging as was brought up in the IMLS Leadership Project "T3:  Text, Tagging and Trust to Improve Image Access for Museums and Libraries".  Namely, the great difference in specificity of the tagging.  It offers "computational linguistic processing of user-contributed tags and associated text" and "leveraging multilingual tags" sections.

In the first section it offers their results for the computational linguistic tools.  These tools sit at the back end of a website similar to www.steve.museum, and the front end gathers tags.  Their tools were able to achieve 79% accuracy in lemmatizing (finding the base of words).  They also looked at Parts of Speech Ambiguity, and found that such terms often occur in the same tag cloud, which can be used to "determine cohesion of bigrams".  They also determine that most text about images is about the work of art, rather than the context (ie the painter).

The article also discussed that multilingual tags.  The most popular terms are often exact translations of the most popular terms in the other language (45% of the time) or the second most popular term in the other language (36.36% of the time).  The most common tagging elements where in the following order:  "general person or thing", "visual elements" and "non-subject matter" (painter names, etc.)

Implications:

For my dissertation,  the tool that lemmitizes tags at such a high rate of accuracy is clearly important, and could definitely help to overcome the perception that tagging offers inconsistent results.  The results showing that the most common results of multilingual tagging are often direct translations is interesting in that it offers an argument that tagging leads to standardisation.  I will have to take a look at the references of this article given how most of use was found in such a short article.

Enacting engagement online:  framing social media use for the museum

This article discusses how museums might want to re-engage with their audiences.  In particular it deals with the problem that although museums might want to do this, their methods have traditionally left the public feeling that the museum was trying to take their traditional authority on interpretation into a new sphere.  It does this by frame analysis, with the frames:  The Marketing Frame (advertising the museum's activities, and promoting the brand); The Inclusivity Frame (providing inclusion for the public into the activities of the museum); The Collaborative Frame (the frame where the museum allows for the audience to co-produce narratives).

One of the problems the article found is that museums often have a "risk averse culture", and this means that their efforts state that they intend to empower, interact with and democratise their processes, but rarely actually do so.  Often museums simply launch social media initiatives, without understanding the technical resources needed in order to garner the benefit they hope to achieve (ie, that simply joining Facebook, and having an audience doesn't mean that the posts will automatically achieve any of the museum's goals without planning and staff who know how to engage with the audience in that platform).

The article proposes those three frames as a beginning, but also mentions that there are other potential frames of analysis.

Implications:

The main implication is that museums may state that they are interested in engaging with the general public concerning their collections, but haven't thus far actually done so.  They often seem to be a bit preachy, and without developing a good framework for addressing increased public engagement, they run the risk of putting effort into something in a way that doesn't gain them the intended benefit.  Perhaps of the greatest implication is the fact that this article was published by someone at my university.  So, it might be interesting to see if I can contact this person in order to see if she has further insights or suggestions.