viz.

High Yellow by Ellsworth Kelly, courtesy of the Blanton Museum of Art

This year, the Visual Rhetoric Workgroup has collaborated with the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin on the Steve in Action project. Steve in Action is a collaboration of individuals and institutions collectively exploring the value of social tagging to improve access to cultural heritage collections and engage audiences in new ways. (For more about the Steve in Action Project, see their web site.)

Through this collaboration, the DWRL and the Blanton are conducting a study that explores how undergraduate students use software (like those provided by social media sites such as Flickr or Facebook) to tag digital images of abstract works of art. We are particularly interested in exploring what type of language undergraduate students use to respond to abstract art, and how tagging art alters students' experience and understanding of the artwork. This study will have implications for understanding social tagging as it is used in art and writing instruction. In addition, the project should serve as a way to understand the greater implications of social tagging as it investigates students' abilities to produce forms of knowledge in other areas based on skills learned in the literature, composition, or art classroom.

Although the Steve in Action team believes that its research into the value of social tagging to enhance finding will prove a significant contribution to our community’s understanding of social tagging and access to abstract art, the constraints of deploying the Steve in Action tagging tools in an artificial environment structured specifically to answer research questions have made it difficult for the Steve in Action team to develop authentic and engaging tagging activities and interfaces and thus to begin to examine another series of questions about social tagging. We are keenly interested in questions of motivation and in understanding how social tagging engages and rewards the visitor; in gauging the uses and benefits of social tagging for institutions and their visitors; and in measuring what kinds of support and resources are required by institutions hoping to institute social tagging practices.

As part of a major research university, we extend the research on tagging initiated by the Steve in Action team to look at a primary audience we serve, undergraduate students, and to learn about what language they use to describe and categorize works of art that use abstraction. We hope to use the data we collect from this research to inform museum education practices at the Blanton and to share with faculty who use this content to teach undergraduates.

Currently, the study is its first phase, which asks students to look at a collection of digital images and read contextual information about them if they choose. They then answer a series of questions about the experience. The survey collects information about how students responded to the art and asks them to describe the experience of looking at it, and also to engage in a small writing exercise by defining abstract art and retitling three of the images. You can explore the interface here.

We record the language these undergraduate subjects use to describe abstract art in order to help museum professionals and educators assess what university students find interesting, understand, or misunderstand about such art. We hope that the data we collect will provide information about how social tagging technology mediates students' experience of images and helps them translate visual meaning into verbal descriptions.

The second phase of the project will ask student to tag the digital images using the social-tagging interface designed by the Steve Project. It will likely be implemented in the fall of 2010.