What We Talk About When We Tag About Art

Opening Plenary for the 2007 NMC Pachyderm Conference

Our constituents—students, visitors, and colleagues—are talking to us. After years of experiencing a (primarily) one-way conversation about art, in which educators, authors, and other “experts” selected, described, and contextualized art and art history, users have embraced the new tools of Web 2.0. These tools, including social tagging, personalization, and user contributed content, have given voice to the vision of users of art images online. Susan Chun, a founder of steve.museum —a museum-based project that is developing tools for collecting tags (or user-contributed descriptions of art)—will present some early and sometimes surprising results of the steve project’s research into what users see and say when tagging art. She will look at user-contributed content gathered by other Web 2.0 projects such as Wikipedia, and will consider some of the implications for Pachyderm users and others of the ways in which our dialogue with users will be reshaped by the emerging new media environment.

Susan Chun consults with cultural heritage organizations on information management and intellectual property strategy and policy. Her clients include museums, libraries, universities, and funders. She is a founder of the steve project, which is investigating the value of social tagging to improve access to museum collections. Until 2007, Susan was general manager for collections information planning at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where she was responsible for institutional strategy and for developing and managing projects involving intellectual property, asset management and archiving, digital imaging and licensing, publishing and standards. Prior to that, Susan was involved in all aspects of the Met’s scholarly and exhibition publishing program in the museum’s editorial department. She writes and lectures regularly on copyright, publishing, open content initiatives and social software.