Category: Art
March 20, 2006
Folksonomies in Museums
No, not as a historical arifact of “high Web 2.0 fashion”— as a tool for engaging museum visitors and helping to bridge the “semantic gap.” I mentioned an earlier paper on the steve.museum project. The new paper, Steve.Museum: Exploring social tagging and folksonomy in the museum [PDF], raises a number of interesting ideas and questions, such as: “The resulting folksonomy,… 
March 2, 2006
Camouflage: Art, Science, and Popular Culture
I’ve been meaning to share a link to what looks to be an interesting conference on camouflage. The conference organizer, Roy Behrens, was one of my professors at the University of Northern Iowa. He lectured for several class sessions during a History of Design course on his research into the history of camouflage. To me, the most interesting part concerned…
September 15, 2005
Tagging Museum Collections
The September issue of D-Lib (Digital Libraries) Magazine features an article with the hefty title Social Terminology Enhancement through Vernacular Engagement: Exploring Collaborative Annotation to Encourage Interaction with Museum Collections. Essentially, a group of museum and digital library people are trying to find new ways for users to interact with digital collections of art and artifacts using folksonomies. They have…
July 20, 2005
Realms of the Unreal
Watched In the Realms of the Unreal [Amazon], the 2004 documentary on Henry Darger the other night. Darger’s significance is hard to encapsulate. An orphaned child and quiet janitor, he left behind a 15,000 page novel with thousands of accompanying paintings and drawings describing an epic war between rebelling child slaves led by the seven Vivian Girls, and their evil…
February 20, 2005
The Gates
Went out with the rest of the world and saw The Gates, Christo & Jeanne-Claude’s installation in Central Park. It was really amazing in the way that it created an event and transformed a familiar place, causing people to take a closer look. Check out the Flickr tag gates for over 3,000 photos….