The PRIX ARS ELECTRONICA were announced yesterday, and steve.museum received an honorary mention in the Digital Communities category.

steve.museum has released enhancements to the steve tagger. you can now:

• share images and tags
• invite others to participate, and
• display your tagged works on a Facebook profile pages, invite FB friends to tag, and see the most popular tagged works of art.

not "a failure", btw, but "failure" ... something that i don't think we talk about enough.

This reminded me that tags take their meaning not just from what they say, but from the position they occupy between people and their interests.

My tags are liminal objects, staking out a boundary between me and stuff out there that i care about. That boundary isn't fixed, but variable. And it's that variablility in the boundary condition that makes tag analysis as challenging as it is. Sometimes the ties are strong, sometimes they're weaker ... sometimes i invest a lot in tagging, sometimes it's quick and done...

studying tag vocabulary is a window into what people notice. it's interesting as much for the aggregate (what many people notice) as for the outlier (what's noticed only by one).

/jt

A work of art in the context of my personal web space -- in this case, my Facebook profile.... and slate's.

see the related blog posting.

At the steve.museum session at MCN we devoted a significant amount of time to "Term Review" –– what we're calling the qualitative study of tags by professionals from participating museums within the context of the steve.museum research project. It fed really nicely into a discussion at the project team research meeting post-MCN.

For some, the very possibility that tags contributed by taggers of works of art might be reviewed by museums is antithetical to the ethos of user tagging. But, within the context of steve.museum it's essential for developing our understanding of the contribution that tagging and folksonomy might make to the accessibility of works of art on-line.

How, for example, can we respond to our colleagues' concern that tags will be inaccurate | misleading | misspelled | mis-guided, if we don't look at them and see if they are? How can we say that they might be useful, if we haven't looked?

during the steve.museum research project, each tag is looked at by museum staff, and evaluated.