Hey everyone ---
these discussions echo some of the themes we've explored in steve.
How you conceptualize folksonomy is related closely to what it is you
think you are enabling by it, and thinking about one half of that
equation exposes pre-conceptions on the other.
If you think that folksonomic strategies are enabling 'internet
users' to catalog your collection for you, then you'll want to
implement systems and protocols that support institutional values,
like consistency, authority, accuracy, and strict interoperability.
But if you think of folksonomy as a way to enable a user to make a
personal connection with your museum collection, and conceive of it
as supporting re-discovery (of things that i've seen in your museum
that i'm interested in) as much as new discovery (of things in your
collection that i might be interested in), then many of those
questions don't matter, and what is more important is the user
experience, and feedback loop.
Personally, i'm becoming more and more convinced that tags exist in a
space between a user and a resource, and that their meaning is
situationally defined. the popular del.icio.us tag 'toread' is a good
example of this. it only means something to me, now. it doesn't
really mean anything to you, because i can't know if you want toread
this thing. And it won't mean the same thing to me tomorrow when
i've read that thing -- assuming that i'm keeping up on my reading ;)
So letting people tag museum objects is letting them say what those
objects mean to them, and helping them re-create that sense of
meaning at a later time. So any way they choose to assert meaning
(any tag they use) is valid -- within limits of socially acceptable
behaviour of course.
This doesn't discount the social leverage we get from tagging. You
might be really interested in the things that i want toread because
you're interested in the same things that i am. So you follow the
things that i want toread assuming that there will be useful stuff
there. That's where the power of del.icious. tag streams comes from.
Nor does it belie the broader utility that derives from the way that
personal tags cluster around information resources, a confluence that
might help us leverage the power of the personal for institutional
ends. If the same tag, from a set that we know (like impressionism
from a known list of styles) is used by x number of people to
describe the same resource, can we assume that that resource is
really about that? (i.e. that it is 'impressionist' ? i know i
changed parts of speech there). The studies that The Metropolitan
Museum has begun in this area are really interesting and hint at
statistical thresholds.
We've also got a lot to learn about what people find interesting in
our collections. We really don't know how they will describe them,
but we're pretty sure that the way the general public thinks about
art and the way that a specialist conceives of it are very different:
preliminary tests have also born this out. if we know what kinds of
things people are interested in will we change our descriptive
practices?
I'm convinced that there are lots of ways that museums can use
tagging; we've just got to do it in a conscious way, and try and
learn from our experience. that's what's making the Steve
collaboration fun.
Happy Thanksgiving -- to some of you from someone who celebrated it a
while ago: it seems the meaning of holidays is situationally
dependent too ;)
jt
--
__________
J. Trant [email protected]
Partner & Principal Consultant phone: +1 416 691 2516
Archives & Museum Informatics fax: +1 416 352 6025
158 Lee Ave, Toronto
Ontario M4E 2P3 Canada http://www.archimuse.com
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