vocabulary analysis

Tagging, Folksonomy and Art Museums: Results of steve.museum’s research

J. Trant, Archives & Museum Informatics

Abstract
Tagging has proven attractive to art museums as a means of enhancing access to on-line collections. The steve.museum research project studied tagging and the relationship of the resulting folksonomy to professionally created museum documentation. A variety of research questions were proposed, and methods for answering them explored. Works of art were assembled to be tagged, a tagger was deployed, and tagging encouraged. A folksonomy of 36,981 terms was gathered, comprising 11,944 terms in 31,031 term/work pairs. The analysis of the tagging of these works – and the assembled folksonomy – is reported here, and further work described.