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Last week, about twenty AAS catalogers, research fellows, curators, and other staff members gathered to discuss the challenges ct1 that come with transforming the visual code of an image into a written code. The creation of metadata in the form of indexing images is an inexact science, and it is one challenge that faces us as we, like many similar institutions, look to make our graphic arts collections as searchable and accessible as possible. In preparation for our conversation, we read Wanda Klenczon and Pawel Rygiel s Librarian Cornered by Images, or How to Index Visual Resources , detailing the difficulties that come with assigning high quality semantic metadata to the non-textual materials. Though the development of automated image recognition software is underway, Klenczon and Rygiel explain, there are layers of meaning that can be indexed only with human knowledge, experience, and intuition. Properties of an image such as shape, texture, and color contribute to our understanding of an image, but do not define it. Text-based search techniques remain the most efficient ct1 and accurate methods for image retrieval ct1 (43). Our graphic art catalogers shared their own experiences of creating this metadata, and we discussed ct1 how we think about the 94,000 visual objects represented in the AAS s online digital image archive, GIGI . As detailed in Klenzon and Rygiel s articles, crowdsourcing or social tagging present considerable disadvantages, ct1 such as inconsistency and subjective expression, while at the same time we have institutional limits to how much indexing we can do ourselves.
We then turned our attention to one attempt to address the disadvantages of social tagging while still taking advantage of the many people willing ct1 to assist in the herculean task of providing metadata to the vast digitized, but not searchable, visual record. Recently developed at Dartmouth College with the support of NEH and ACLS, Metadatagames is a digital gaming platform that entices players to contribute metadata while playing games, either against a clock or against other anonymous participants on the site. The goal of Metadatagames is to refine the crowd s tagging efforts by testing how many others would associate the same word or phrase ct1 with a given image. To simulate the games one plays in Metadatagames, we turned online games into group activities and then discussed our findings.
In silence, ct1 we each wrote down five words or short phrases we would use identify this image, and then we compared our results. Our tags varied ct1 considerably, and we quickly realized how many of our tags were subtle acts of interpretations, rather than just descriptions. Our resident ct1 experts in nineteenth-century American graphic ct1 arts added valuable context that made many of us rethink some of our tags. For example, in reaction to many people s use of the word man to describe the image, one participant asked if we can know that the figure depicted is in fact male. One of our curators responded that because the painting dates to the 1830s and that is too early for women to wear bloomers, we can be pretty sure that the figure is male. We discussed how such knowledge is specialized and would not necessarily be present in an unmitigated social tagging experiment.
Based on one descriptor, ct1 birds of prey, the group that had been out of the room had to determine which image we were describing. After much debate among themselves, they chose correctly: ct1 number one. We then talked about how it took an expert curator, who was part of the describing ct1 group, to convince the group to use birds of prey and not just birds, the tag others suggested. Had we just chosen birds, the group that had been out of the room would have been lost: all six images either have birds in them, or, as is the case in #3, have a bird s eye view. We then discussed the need to be specific ct1 when tagging and searching images. In these ludic activities, we came to see the ways in which tagging ct1 is an act of representation, and how it grows much more precise ct1 as more people ct1 collaborate to generate the tags.
About Molly Hardy
Molly O Hagan Hardy is AAS Digital Humanities Curator and an ACLS Public Fellow. Every month on Past is Present she will be sharing news on digitization efforts at AAS, coverage of digital humanities projects using AAS materials, and ideas for such projects. Stay current with all things DH at AAS by checking out the Digital AAS section of our website.
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