Research
This project is the work of the Adler Planetarium's Collections and Zooniverse teams, as well as part of the research of Adler's digital collections access manager, Jessica BrodeFrank. The tags and terms generated by this project will be used by Jessica BrodeFrank for her dissertation and research at the University of London. They will also be used to enrich the Adler Planetarium's collections' metadata and online search catalogs. Below the goals of the dissertation and the project are explained.
Research Background:
This project began with questioning how museum staff and curators’ control over metadata creation has limited representation and connection to communities. Over the last fifty years, scholars, researchers, and the public have called for museums, libraries, archives, and galleries to expand their representation. This includes calling into question the racist and colonialist origins of these institutions, as well as the biases shown in all aspects of museum work. These decisions have affected public trust and participation with these institutions. Questions on transparency remain - who gets to decide what is worth saving, displaying, and what/whose story gets to be told.
There has also been research on the use of user created (crowdsourced) terms/tags as a way to increase access to collections. More recently, research looked at how user terms may help increase the diversity of voices surrounding museum object description and stories, but sadly, many of these projects stalled. While these projects are often originally planned to help museum staff by outsourcing certain aspects of museum work, such as cataloguing, to the public, they often can become too expensive and time consuming.
Within this project and the research done by Jessica BrodeFrank, we look to demonstrate Jessica’s own research questions. Through crowdsourcing, this project is testing using user-generated terms to create a more diverse set of search terms, more inclusive storylines, and meaningful and transparent experiences for the public. The goal is to connect people to the museum and bring them into the work of saving our stories.
Zooniverse Project Goals:
In order to test crowdsourcing as a tool for engaging experiences, Jessica BrodeFrank’s research will be based on case studies within the United States, specifically using the Adler Planetarium’s collections. She chose the Adler Planetarium's visual arts collection consisting of pieces from the rare book library, archival photographs, and works on paper to be the project data set. Research shows that these pieces are most often cataloged by museums to reflect what they are (tags consisting of who made the piece, where it was made, what it was made of, and when it was made) but often are missing what the image is actually about. Most internet searches for museum collections focus on this "aboutness" and can fail to return all the pieces the museum has. There may be images of rainbows in the collection, but if no one added the word “rainbow” to that record, you won’t be able to find it! By inviting the public to help tag these images, we will enrich our records with additional language, increasing the ability to discover the collections.
This Zooniverse project includes two workflows: “Verify AI Tags” which asks users to verify tags/terms created by artificial intelligence tagging software, and “Tag Images” which asks users to add their own tags to describe what they see in a collections image. We are testing multiple workflows to see if being shown certain terms causes any effect on what tags volunteers add. We also hope to demonstrate how artificial intelligence and machine learning models come with their own biases, and how the tags created by these models may not always make sense to users. We wanted to show this to explain why machines can’t just do the work for museum collections and how the internet searches we do every day can be affected by these same kinds of issues.
With this project, our team is not looking for a single right answer or a consensus. We expect that people may add the same tags and terms as they tag individual images, so we are setting higher retirement limits (the number of people who must classify an image before it is removed from the project) to try to get as many voices and choices as possible. This will allow us to better understand the differences in language, choice of tags/terms, and range of new ways of seeing the collections.
Research Outputs:
At the end of this project, terms created will be added to the Adler Planetarium's database to increase search terms available on the online catalogue. Additionally, the terms will be processed as part of Jessica BrodeFrank's research and dissertation in order to visualize a user created vocabulary. This will help to show how successful these projects may be in terms of diversity, description, findability, and engagement. A full dataset will be shared on GitHub that will show the objects included in this project with the Adler Planetarium's own cataloging terms (as of August 2020), the Metropolitan Museum of Art iMet tagger terms, the Google Cloud Vision API tagger terms, and the most terms created in each workflow of the Zooniverse project.
Help the Adler know who participated in "Tag Along with Adler," and how your experience was! Fill out the survey here: https://forms.gle/JZ3fuZhKdvahe5dm7