Visitors As Data

Robert SteinChief Information OfficerIndianapolis Museum of Artrstein@imamuseum.org@rjsteinhttp://www.imamuseum.org

Visitors As Data

Creating a Reinforcing Relationship with User

Engagement

VISITORSAREROBOTS

source ~donsolo

Visitor Inclusion

• No offense to Bruce, but who doesn’t want this?

VISITORSARE DATA

source ~victoriapeckham

Modes of Visitor Data

PASSIVE

ACTIVE

AGGRESSIVE

VISITOR’S ACTION

NONE

INTERNAL

COORDINATED

MUSEUM’S RESPONSE

Passive Data Generation

How Can We Get Here?

PASSIVE

ACTIVE

AGGRESSIVE

VISITOR’S ACTION

NONE

INTERNAL

COORDINATED

MUSEUM’S RESPONSE

Visitors As Data

Visitors Havethe Brain

Power WeWant

Credit: Benedict Campbell

Unfortunately, visitors aren’tclones we can direct to

do our bidding

source ~donsolo

How can visitors take part in powering their ownexperience?

source ~ mindcaster-ezzolicious

Can we create a virtuous circle with visitors that clearly expresses the value and impact of their participation?

VISITOR ENGAGEMENT

MUSEUMIMPACT

source ~m-louis

Social Tagging

www.steve.museum steve@steve.museum

A Few Highlights

88% of tags were usefulIf you found this work using this term would you be surprised?

Museum professionalsfound most tags useful

www.steve.museum steve@steve.museum

A Few Highlights

Tags are different than museum documentation:

86% of all tags not found in label copy

www.steve.museum steve@steve.museum

A Few Highlights

Tags are almost always useful when they are assigned two or more times

Pretty Cool Tools

You want me to do

what?

source ~donsolo

Silly Museum… Robots are Friends

Do you really have a tour

called WTF?

Crowdsourced cropping from the V&A: http://collections.vam.ac.uk/crowdsourcing

This is Getting Easier

Steve in Action

• Funded in 2008 by the IMLS• Led by the New Media Consortium in

collaboration with IMA, Susan Chun and a host of museum partners

• A Few Project Goals– Make Social Tagging Easy– Develop Innovative New

Interfaces– Facilitate Cross-Collection

Search / Browsing

Steve in Action Features

• Simple Import (CSV, CDWA, Scraping)

• Hosted and Themable Data Collection Platform

• Powerful API Access• Cut-n-Paste Tagging

Widgets for Easy Integration

IMA’s Collection

54,000 objects in collection

2,242 objects on display (4%)

26,268 objects with images (48%)

Using Steve widgets to drive social tagging

Some are Easy to Tag

Some are not

Some are really hard…

Tagcow

• Use crowdsourcing to add tags / data to image collections

• Cost $0.15 - $0.20 per image• Tagcow uses software built on Amazon’s

Mechanical Turk to process 100,000’s of images per day.

Mechanical Turk Demographics

Source:Panos Ipeirotis - http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2008/03/mechanical-turk-demographics.html

IMA and Tagcow

• IMA gave Tagcow links to about 26,000 collection objects with images

• Tagcow returned 298,668 Total Tags– 254,130 descriptive tags (28,708 distinct)– 44,538 color tags– Term Frequency: Min (1), Max(4299), Avg(8.85)– Document Frequency: Min (1) Max(134) Avg(9.94)

• 29,174 tags with more than one word

So, 300,000 tags…

can’t we just make a

Wordle

outta that?

TagCow

So how do we deal with

this stuff anyway?

• Funded in 2008 by IMLS• Led by University of Maryland in

collaboration with IMA, Susan Chun and a working group of museums.

• Studying the relationships between social tags, scholarly text and resources, and the application of trust networks to improve access to museum collections.

Can we use keywords from text as context for tags?

Can Tags help to disambiguate keywords from text?

Heirarchy for Tags

Heirarchy for Tags

Finding a Needle in the Haystack

Trust Networks for Weighting

D

B

E

C

AA Trusts B

B DOES NOT TRUST E

B Trusts CB Trusts D

D Trusts

C A INFERS Trust in B

ThankYou!