VIEWER TAGGING IN ART MUSEUMS: COMPARISONS TO CONCEPTS AND VOCABULARIES OF ART MUSEUM VISITORS

Abstract

As one important experiment in the social or user-generated classification of online cultural heritage resources collections, art museums are leading the effort to elicit keyword descriptions of artwork images from online museum visitors. The motivations for having online viewers— presumably largely non-art-specialists—describe art images are (a) to generate keywords for image and object records in museum information retrieval systems in a cost-effective way and (b) to engage online visitors with the artworks and with each other by inviting visitors to express themselves and share their descriptions of artworks. This paper explores the question of how effective non-specialist art keyworders can be in capturing (“tagging”) potentially useful concepts and terms for use in art information retrieval systems. To do this, the paper compares evidence from art museum visitor studies which describe how non-specialist art viewers react to and describe artworks and use museum-supplied information in their initial encounters with artworks. A theoretical model of artwork interpretation derived from art museum visitor research provides a framework with which to examine both the activity and the products of artwork tagging for image and information retrieval.