The Challenge of Ubiquity in Digital Culture
CHArt 27th ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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The Challenge of Ubiquity in Digital Culture
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Max Arends, Martin Weingartner, Josef Froschauer, Doron Goldfarb, Dieter Merkl
The Perception of Art on the Web by Analysing a Tagging Platform for Artworks
A great number of pictures of artworks can be explored on the Internet. Various platforms offer the possibility to view artworks in high resolution and in great quantity. Examples are the Google Art Project and the Web Gallery ofArt. Furthermore a lot of art historical information can be accessed online, since a lot of libraries and museum websites publish their scientific publications on the Web. Various Web platforms exist, that combine art historical information while examining pictures of the artworks themselves. For example smarthistory offers audio commentaries while simultaneously showing artworks.
This approaches offers information only in a one-directional way. Users without sophisticated knowledge in art history might feel intimidated by the scientific vocabulary and therefore will not access this information. Also, this is an intellectual approach and therefore lacks the more joyful, playful and emotional aspects of exploring art. One way to provide a playful, bidirectional approach of communication is to offer the possibility to annotate (tag) the artworks and thereby interact with a community. Tagging allows users to freely associate and annotate whatever comes to their mind.
We created the explorARTorium, a web platform that makes use of contextualisation. Each artwork is put into context with other artworks of the same artist, the same title, the same school (Italian, English, Dutch, etc), the same motive (portrait, religious, landscape) and from the same time-period. Furthermore the explorARTorium encourages users to annotate artworks. By offering the possibility to view artworks in context, it fosters users to explore art, without presuming sophisticated knowledge about art history. More than 150 users provided over 95.000 tags for about 8.800 artworks.
We then analysed the tags and classified them in factual tags (information about location, subject, figures etc.), subjective tags (feelings, and opinions) and personal tags, which describe the personal relationships to an artwork.
Our examination shows that most of the tags describe factual tags, while only a small amount tags are classified as subjective and personal tags. We show what themes and genres of artworks evoke feelings and emotions, and which ones do not. Furthermore we draw conclusions whether there is a correlation between the knowledge of the users and their emotional perception. Finally we provide knowledge on how to develop Web platforms that endorse feelings and make it therefore possible to percept art more emotional and joyful.