Monday, August 6, 2012

Metadata Anyday! Metadata Games from Dartmouth

Play these addictive image tagging games from Dartmouth digital humanities. But, before you get started (and get hopelessly hooked), read the back story here at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

I love nothing more than crowd sourcing, metadata and a bit of archival material, so this project is really interesting. By creating a series of online games, like Alum Tag, where the goal is to recognize an alum in an old photo, the archivists at Dartmouth have created a method to propel findability.

In collaboration with Mary Flanagan, an artist-designer and digital humanities professor at Dartmouth, Peter Carini, the Dartmouth college archivist obtained a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the project launched.

Naturally, the tags must be vetted by real, live archivists to ensure viability, but the process goes a heck of a lot faster than waiting until there is time to apply full and proper metadata. In the meantime, as the games collect data, the collections open to a wider audience sooner than waiting in line for formal processing.

And, as long as the metadata is of sufficient quality (current stats point to 70-80% of tags are good), this is a win win situation.

 

No comments:

Post a Comment