Tags on Artworks

When viewing an artwork on the website you will notice a section called TELL US WHAT YOU SEE in the right sidebar.  This is the area where you can interact with the page by providing your own tags.  It also displays the top tags provided by users for this work.  When you enter your own tags they will be highlighted in a color matching the IMA logo on the page.

The larger the tag the more times it has been used to describe this work.  You can even hover your mouse over each tag to get a tool-tip that shows how many times that tag has been used. Clicking on a tag will take you to the Collection Search and perform a search for other works with that tag.

Tags in the Collection Search

One of the goals of using tagging on the IMA website is to make artworks easier to discover. To achieve this we also integrated the tags into the collection search. When you perform a search you will be provided with a list of the top tags associated with all of the works in the left sidebar. You can click on these tags to filter your search results to only see works with the tags clicked. As you can see in the image on the right, I have filtered my search to only show works that have the tags sky and water associated with them.

Tag Tours

Tag Tours provide a guided tour through some interesting works that you otherwise might not discover on our site. These tours were built by our staff to provide a fun and alternative experience for browsing our collection.

Tag Tours

Latest Tags

On the Interact page you are able to see the latest tag activity in the right sidebar. Here you can see the most recent tags added to works in our collection. You can click on any of these tags to view the page for the work that the tag was applied to.

Interact

How it’s Made

All of the tagging functionality was built using the Steve Tagger software. The Steve Tagger software is being developed to provide tagging for museums and to make it easy. For full disclosure… I am one of the primary developers on the Steve Tagging project and the IMA is one of the grant partners.

Moving Time

Yes that’s right, I moved here from the center of America, Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  I actually am a native Hoosier but moved further out west a few years ago.  South Dakota is an interesting place, it is very flat and has a lot of wind.  There are a lot of windmill farms popping up all over the state.  We enjoyed living in South Dakota but the opportunity at the museum was a good excuse to move back.

My family freezing in South Dakota. I will not miss the long cold winters.

Enough about me, now to something interesting I found over the summer.

While browsing the web I found and became an avid watcher of a design contest called Layer Tennis.  This contest pitted designers against each other in a challenge to build off of each others work.  Here is the description from the website:

We’ll be playing matches using video, animation, sound, photos, type and lots more, but the basic idea is the same no matter what tools are in use. Two competitors will swap a file back and forth in real-time, adding to and embellishing the work. Each artist gets fifteen minutes to complete a “volley” and then we post it to the site live. A third participant, a writer, provides play-by-play commentary on the action, as it happens.

There were a lot of interesting designs that came out of this contest.  I thought it was really exciting to see how each designer was able to take a quick 15 minutes and really add their own style to the work.

One of my favorite series of images came from this ‘volley‘ where Chris Glass and Aaron Draplin ended in a draw.  This fall they will be having another challenge so keep an eye on the the site if you liked what you saw from this series.

Developing Steve User Personae

The group of project members come from all walks of the museum life.  Using their backgrounds we performed an exercise in user-centered design.  We developed personae of more than 100 fictitious individuals who might use the tools we will develop in some shape or form.  Using these people as reference we then wrote scenarios describing how these users would specifically use tools we might develop.  The final outcome was a list of approximately 250 requirements to satisfy the developed scenarios.  The NMC, who is administering the grant, guided us through this process which I found very effective.

Please check out the website for the current IMLS grant.

We also posted our pictures from the trip.