On Social Tagging by Native Communities
Tagging can help museums understand how visitors perceive the objects in their collections. While the goal of many tagging projects is to provide better access for the public to online collections, Shelley Mannion, at the University of Lugano, is using it to learn how native communities respond to their own art. Mannion’s findings have implications for how museums can help these communities strengthen their connections to their own culture. She described her research in a lucid presentation, “Seeing Tibetan Art Through Social Tags.”
Working with the open source tagging tool available at http.steve.museum, she asked young Tibetans in Zurich and a control group of Swiss Germans to participate in her research project by tagging six images – five traditional works and one contemporary one. She also interviewed the Tibetans in order to understand how they felt about tagging these works.
What she discovered was that often the young Tibetans didn’t have a lot of knowledge about their own culture, and they felt bad about that, which made them somewhat reluctant to tag the images. Tagging by both the Tibetans and the Swiss Germans showed misunderstandings about the images – what Jennifer Trant calls “teachable moments.” “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 by only one).” J.Trant’s blog, March 7, 2008.
Through tagging, visitors “teach” curators what they know about the works, what interests them, what they see and don’t see. Since tagging can expose where the gaps in people’s knowledge are, curators also learn what they need to be “teaching.”
Also, tagging can help to identify individuals in the native community who can translate the concepts of one culture into another. These “translators” can help the museum create materials to support the community’s engagement with objects from their own culture. Mannion’s presentation concludes with some advice to bear in mind when designing tagging systems for communities: Think about what would motivate them to participate, and what type of interface would facilitate their participation – something game-like, perhaps.
Mannion’s research, funded by The Rubin Foundation, is ongoing. The tagging project website Seeing Tibet Through Social Tags is inviting Tibetans and non-Tibetans living in New York to participate in the tagging research project. So, log on and tag. It will make you think.