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How Games Can Help Us Access and Understand Archival Images
Abstract
A lack of quality metadata is a key problem encountered with mass-digitization projects as institutions strive to "go digital." This paper reports on a pilot study of Metadata Games, a software system that uses computer games to collect information about archival images in libraries and archives as these institutions digitize millions of items across national collections. Games offer a unique advantage for collecting metadata because they can entice users who might normally be inclined to visit archives to explore humanities content and, in the process, contribute to vital records, and they can work in a wide-scale, distributed fashion to collect much more metadata than a typical archives staff member could contribute alone in the same time frame. Metadata Games can be used to enhance knowledge about images associated with particular disciplines and fields, or in interdisciplinary collections. This open-source system is easily customized to meet each institution's needs. By inviting mass participation, Metadata Games opens the door for archivists, researchers, and the public to unearth new knowledge that could radically enhance scholarship across the disciplines. Metadata Games expands what researchers, students, and the public can encounter in their quest to understand the human experience. Games offer great promise for humanities scholarship by uniting the culture of the archives with a diverse user base, including researchers, hobbyists, and gamers.
... Another development in the field of metadata crowdsourcing games aimed at describing different digitized collections was the development of the Metadata Games [19] project, a free and open source software system that uses computer games to collect information on archival images. Metadata Games is designed to be a free, open source, customizable software package available to a wide range of cultural heritage institutions without expensive licensing fees or contracts, helping cultural heritage institutions gain useful data for their collections, assisting scholars in learning how to interact and utilize collections in new and possibly unexpected ways, and providing a host of opportunities for the public to interact with cultural heritage institutions [20]. The project currently offers two mobile and four online games aimed at collecting metadata, and is used with over 45 collections worldwide. ...
... These "play HITs" should engage participants, strengthen identity, and promote social bonding, while explicitly not attempting to improve crowd workers' fluency or efficiency in performing HITs or otherwise functioning on MTurk, differentiating them from crowdsourcing games that perform productive work for companies or organizations, e.g. [36,48]. This might initially seem impractical or even radical. ...
While past work has admirably supported crowd workers in improving their work performance, we argue that there is also value in designing for enjoyment untied from work outcomes--- what we call "tangential play.'' To this end, we present Turker Tales, a Google Chrome extension that uses tangential play to encourage crowd workers to write, share, and view short tales as a side activity to their main job on Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Turker Tales introduces a layer of playful narrativization atop typical crowd work tasks in order to alter workers' experiences of those tasks without aiming to improve work efficiency or quality. Using speed-dating (N=12) and a pilot test (N=150) to inform our design, we deployed Turker Tales over one week with 171 participants, receiving 1,096 tales and 1,527 ratings of those tales. We found that our system of tangential play brought to light underlying conflicts (such as unfair working conditions), and provided a space for participants to reveal aspects of themselves and their shared experiences. Through Turker Tales, we critically reflect on the roles of researchers, designers, and requesters in crowd work, and the ethics of incorporating play into crowd work, and consider the implications of the paradigm we introduce both as a method of research through design and as a direction for design to support crowd workers.
... Examples include crowdsourcing projects like the Library of Congress's Flickr photo identification effort and the New York Public Library's menu Project. 36 These efforts have seen varying degrees of success and have been hampered by mischievous (or malicious) participants, lack of publicity, and/or lack of technology accessibility by record subjects and end-users who would be in the best place to provide feedback. 37 In addition to crowdsourcing efforts, recent attention has been given to opening up the finding aid to more contributors and editors in an effort to provide greater contextualization and the capability for more efficient research triangulation. ...
Two frameworks for understanding how we acquire, utilize, and preserve information within the archival profession include the concepts of information ecology and the participatory archive. As these frameworks converge, there are immense implications for how participatory actors interact with each other to create, transfer, and interpret archival records. The interactions of the archivist, record creators, subjects, and users of archival materials, facilitated by new technologies, have forever changed the dynamic within the archive. This article will examine how technologies and their usage affects the relationship dynamic between the various actors within participatory archives and resultant implications for appraisal and description.
... developed by Dartmouth College was implemented and localized for Croatian language. As authors describe it: "…games and game like activities can be used to attract the public to participate in providing valuable descriptive metadata... [by providing] a game approach that attracts participants to a site and facilitates tagging in an enjoyable way" (Flanagan and Carini, 2012). This approach gave us the opportunity to collect large corpora of tags in a way that users may find enjoyable. ...
This paper explores possible approaches in analysis of folksonomies in subject indexing of heritage materials in order to examine user tags as a method complementing traditional subject access in the online environment. Research was undertaken using crowdsourcing methods, namely Game With a Purpose, where corpora of 14,402 submitted tags on selected 80 heritage objects divided into 4 categories (library, archive, museum and photographs) was gathered for statistical, linguistic and content analysis.
... The exploitation of collaboration between museums, and thus metadata standardization, is also another topic of interest that is regarded as a major factor in producing disruptive applications in the cultural heritage scenario (Skinner, 2014). To this respect, leveraging smartphones and Web 2.0 technologies can represent a means to detect whicth context-aware metadata can be used for standardizing user-generated knowledge (Flanagan and Carini, 2012). ...
In a globalized economy, cultural heritage is a strong attractor. Thanks to ICT, it is possible to trigger new
development dynamics. For cultural heritage, the contribution of new technologies can offer the highest
degree of distribution and access opportunities. A modern museum can actually be seen as a complex ICT
system, deeply interconnected, with typically a large quantity of data to manage, extremely dynamic due to
ever-changing temporary exhibitions, and with applications that feature a high level of usability for a higher
visitor involvement. The aim of this position paper is to create an approach geared to provide aggregated
information on the nature, range and articulation of the belongings of the museum, through a paradigm based
on the concept of complex network. Applying the complex network model, it will be possible to map a corpora
of items made of works of art, artifacts and any object of interest for a museum. The implications derived
from the adoption of this approach are multifarious: for example, a curator could evaluate partnership
opportunities in the organization of temporary exhibitions, guided paths or catalog editing through an analysis
of the relations between the items in their museum and the ones in other museums.
This qualitative study examines the production of cultural memory within current or recently active UK-based DIY music spaces. Utilising a critical archival theoretical framework, the thesis builds upon previous work which deconstructs subcultural historiography and archiving, identifying the reproduction of whiteness, masculinity, and affluence in heritage projects. By focusing on current or recently active communities, the study engages with archives and histories before they are deposited and/or formed, acknowledging the role of labour in and the construction of narratives through archival work. My analysis therefore moves discussions about subcultural archives beyond examination of sources and into a discipline which explores archiving as practice and labour, archives as organisations, as well as the archive as concept.
The resulting analysis complicates the positioning of punk and DIY music communities as ahistorical. I surface underpinning information infrastructures and informal archival actions which enable community building and connection across generations through preservation and circulation of memory. Exploration of the intersection of socioeconomic circumstances and archival traces identifies how ongoing experiences of austerity, precarity and lack of resource negatively affect the capacity to create and maintain archival projects or sources. The contemporary temporal focus of the study enables an extended consideration of the born digital traces and web heritage of DIY music communities, which is particularly timely given the loss of data stored on widely-used digital platforms such as Myspace Music and the deletion of information produced by queer communities caused by corporate moderation processes and algorithms.
With an increasing reliance on crowdsourcing games as data-gathering tools, it is imperative to understand how to motivate and sustain high levels of voluntary contribution. To this end, the present work directly compared the impact of various "emphasis frames," highlighting distinct intrinsic motivational factors, used to describe an online game in which players provide descriptive metadata "tags" for digitized images. An initial study showed that, compared to frames emphasizing personal enjoyment or altruistic motivations, a frame emphasizing a "growing community of players" solicited significantly fewer contributions. A second study tested the hypothesis that this lower level of contribution resulted from social loafing (the tendency to exert less effort in collective tasks in which contributions are anonymous and pooled). Results revealed that, compared to a no-frame control condition, a frame emphasizing the preponderance of other players reduced contribution levels and game replay likelihood, whereas a frame emphasizing the scarcity of fellow players increased contribution and replay levels. Various strategies for counteracting social loafing in crowdsourcing contexts are discussed.
Cet article présente un panorama des principaux projets ayant eu recours à la gamification au bénéfice de projets de numérisation et de bibliothèques numériques, que ce soit dans le domaine de l’indexation ou dans celui de la correction de l’OCR. Ce panorama de projets est suivi d’un état de l’art comportant les fonctionnalités, les motivations et la sociologie des contributeurs des projets de gamification et le périmètre de la gamification comparée aux serious games et au crowdsourcing explicite. En conclusion une comparaison entre crowdsourcing explicite et gamification au regard des résultats obtenus est proposée.
Digital libraries and gamification: overview and state of the art
This article presents an overview of the main gamification projects for digital libraries, either for tagging or OCR correction. This overview is followed by a state of the art with functionalities, motivations, sociology of contributors and the scope of gamification compared to the serious games and explicit crowdsourcing. Finally a comparison of results between explicit crowdsourcing and gamification is proposed.
This article provides an overview of the literature related to metadata in the context of archives and museums. This article has several goals: to outline current practices, theories, and models; to discuss existing metadata schemas; and to identify theoretical models that apply to metadata schema design in this context. The article also explores best practices and identifies gaps in the literature; it offers suggestions for future research on metadata in archives and cultural heritage institutions.
Crowdsourcing, or “obtaining information or services by soliciting input from a large number of people,” is becoming known for the impressive productivity of projects that ask the public to help transcribe, describe, locate, or categorize cultural heritage resources. This essay argues that crowdsourcing projects can also be a powerful platform for audience engagement with museums, offering truly deep and valuable connection with cultural heritage through online collaboration around shared goals or resources. It includes examples of well-designed crowdsourcing projects that provide platforms for deepening involvement with citizen history and citizen science; useful definitions of “engagement”; and evidence for why some activities help audiences interact with heritage and scientific material. It discusses projects with committed participants and considers the role of communities of participants in engaging participants more deeply.
The views of Joan Beaudoin, on the development and subsequent popularity of image tagging at sites such as Flickr, are discussed. A study was done gathering the top 10 image tags of 14 randomly chosen Flickr users. Five people has agreed on 11 of the 18 categories more than 50% of time. Some lower performance categories seems to have resulting a lack of specialized knowledge on the part of several participants. The preference of tagging among Flicker users were geographical locations. The high performance categories of image tags follows a group showing modest usage, which allows each tags for approximately 1-5% of the total tag use by Flicker users. Flicker users tag their images as group, where as variation is found in case of single users. Visual information is as complex as text-based materials and there has been a considerable progress in the image retrieval.
There is growing interest in, and an increasing number of attempts by, traditional information providers to engage social content creation and sharing communities in creating and enhancing the metadata of their photo collections to make the collections more accessible and visible. To enable and guide effective metadata creation, however, it is essential to understand the structure and patterns of the activities of the community around the photographs, resources used, and scale and quality of the socially created metadata relative to the metadata and knowledge already encoded in existing knowledge organization systems. This article presents an analysis of Flickr member discussions around the photographs of the Library of Congress photostream in Flickr. The article also reports on an analysis of the intrinsic and relational quality of the photostream tags relative to two knowledge organization systems: the Thesaurus for Graphic Materials and the Library of Congress Subject Headings. Thirty seven percent of the original tag set and 15.3% of the preprocessed set (after the removal of tags with fewer than three characters and URLs) were invalid or misspelled terms. Nouns, named entity terms, and complex terms constituted approximately 77% of the preprocessed set. More than a half of the photostream tags were not found in the TGM and LCSH, and more than a quarter of those terms were regular nouns and noun phrases. This suggests that these terms could be complimentary to more traditional methods of indexing using controlled vocabularies.
In this paper we present an approach to conceiving of, constructing and comparing the concepts developed and used by geographers, environmental scientists and other earth science researchers to help describe, analyze and ultimately understand their subject of study. Our approach is informed by the situations under which concepts are conceived and applied, captures details of their construction, use and evolution and supports their ultimate sharing along with the means for deep exploration of conceptual similarities and differences that may arise among a distributed network of researchers. The intent here is to support different perspectives onto GIS resources that researchers may legitimately take, and to capture and compute with aspects of epistemology, to complement the ontologies that are currently receiving much attention in the GIScience community.
The author considers the basic building blocks of diplomatics as they might pertain to a more nuanced analysis of visual images. She argues that diplomatics offers archivists an orientation by which to consider the photographic process through its refined notions of what constitutes authority, authenticity, purpose, and extrinsic and intrinsic elements. By creating and applying a typology for institutionally based photographic media according to these notions, archivists could better appraise, preserve, and represent these images.
The conflicts that arise among members of a community or between a portion of the community and the people who run it are discussed. Wikipedia has 49 separate official policies that speak to the operation of the community. 41 policies dealt about the appropriate behavior and seven dealt with the solution of conflicts. Wikipedia is most complete and fully formed system of resolution in comparison to other systems. It invites discussion and argument as means of building consensus among the members. Flickr allows community member to post their images to the web while both the image and other members tag the images for free form description. The person who post the image is the owner of it, which gives that person the right to veto on others' images. ESPGame exchanges simple entertainment for image tags. The community can give more value to keep coming back and supplying more tags for more images.
Imaging technique is a source of information, which has developed to a great extent through digital techniques and the immense growth of the World Wide Web. Two categories of queries are used for image retrieval on the web that includes graphic query and textual query. There are generally three main categories of images, namely artistic image, documentary image and ordinary image. Image indexing are basically divided between two camps such as controlled vocabulary and uncontrolled vocabulary. ICONCLASS is one of the vocabulary image description providing subject specific classification. Uncontrolled vocabularies used for image indexing is a database of ordinary images drawn from the eight section of an online commercial catalogue.
The Flickr Feasibility Study investigated the roles and processes required for a digital collection aggregator to facilitate participation of cultural heritage institutions in Web 2.0 communities. The results demonstrate that providing this service for museums, libraries, and archives can be a natural extension of aggregation activities. While the role is complicated by the varying requirements of different kinds of institutions, analysis of user interactions can guide both collection development and building of communities of interest around cultural heritage collections.
With a suitable algorithm for ranking the expertise of a user in a collaborative tagging system, we will be able to identify experts and discover useful and relevant resources through them. We propose that the level of expertise of a user with respect to a particular topic is mainly determined by two factors. Firstly, an expert should possess a high quality collection of resources, while the quality of a Web resource depends on the expertise of the users who have assigned tags to it. Secondly, an expert should be one who tends to identify interesting or useful resources before other users do. We propose a graph-based algorithm, SPEAR (SPamming-resistant Expertise Analysis and Ranking), which implements these ideas for ranking users in a folksonomy. We evaluate our method with experiments on data sets collected from Delicious.com comprising over 71,000 Web documents, 0.5 million users and 2 million shared bookmarks. We also show that the algorithm is more resistant to spammers than other methods such as the original HITS algorithm and simple statistical measures.