Taggin'

Looking at the global shift in the arts and humanities to gather all that is culture in one single place, the web, I wonder if trusting curatorship to algorithms will actually be useful or only serve a huge experimental purpose... the “orderly shuffle of things”. What makes me strike with doubt my laptop's keys is my understanding of the web not as one single place, but innumerable little rooms, scattered in the virtual world (see post about connected spaces online). I wonder how, scattered physical collections that manage to share fragments of their possessions with no clear or technical idea of how, will manage this task.

In order to make things findable here, as well as in the real world, one element comes in handy: the 'tag'. Tags have been organizing things since libraries or archives exist. Call it a label, a category, a topic... something as simple as 'words'. The internet, though with understanding of semantics, does not yet speak languagues... so who is doing all the taggin' here?

Some initiatives seek the 'social participation' of the public to playfully contribute to moneyless, but fortunately each-day-more-open institutions, classify their huge stock of cultural objects and pieces of art in order to make cultural heritage ‘accessible’. At the same time we learn, and most importantly, we use cultural items. Many institutions are confident that the public (your paintings tagger, the UK or tag.check.score by the ethnological museum of Berlin) or professionals and freaks ('niche sourcing' by Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam) will help them 'organize' stuff... but in order to later make it 'accessible' the algorithms are given the responsibility to work with the input by extracting enough coincidences to link a word to an item.

Seized by all these fun (but-impossible-to-know-all) databases, tools and gadgets I am adding another subject to this blog with the tag “tag”... I will try to bundle, à la very-personal-search-engine, objects, works of art, films and, why not, interesting databases and games, one word at a time. Feel free to comment found tools which you can think of. Why not go social and ask readers for upcoming posts.

(18 September 2013) I would like to make a short addition and pin here a marvelous post by artist and art lecturer Nicholas Jeeves about the 'smile' in portraits. This post was published by publicdomainreview a fun-to-browse portal that celebrates each work of art that becomes public domain (aka do-what-you-will-with-it for free).