ArtUK

ArtUK brings together over 3,000 public collections online across Britain.  At any one time, only about 20% of the public collections are on display at museums and universities.  ArtUK is a charity focused on art education making over 300,000 art pieces accessible online.  It is one of the largest online collections in the world.  The site not only focuses on visually cataloging items but also incorporates story content to give the users depth to their online searches. They “believe in democratizing access to art through our digital platform, which is provided for enjoyment, learning, and research.” 

Anyone can help with this project by creating an account on their website. After verifying the account’s email address, a user can use their login and password to start contributing.   They have three ways to participate in this project;  becoming an art detective, curating a collection, or tagging artwork. 

Art Detective is a way to lend your expertise to this project by participating in the discussion board.  The discussion board is grouped by artwork type as well as subject heading so you can find an area that you would like to research. 

Another option is to curate a collection of art.  Inspired by a recent Kate Davies blog post, “A green dress (again)”  I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Vertigo while curating a collection of art where the ladies are wearing green dresses.  On the website, the Discover tab allows you to conduct searches across all the art.  Once you find the piece you want to add, simply select the icon “Add Artwork to Curation” and select which collection to add it to.  My searches seem to find mainly pieces with “green” in the title of the pieces.  I found a few that had been tagged with “green dresses”.  My collection, ” Veritgo Green” contains 51 works of art which I was given the option to make public. 

Tagging is the other crowdsourcing project within ArtUK.  It seems to be their main focus.  There is a specific tab linking to their tagging page.  You can pick different styles of art or periods to start.  Once the artwork has been selected for tagging, the site asks the user four questions. 

What things, ideas, or objects can you see in this artwork?  Can you name any people depicted in this artwork? Can you name any places depicted in this artwork? Can you name any events depicted in this artwork? 

Once the tagging is complete, the user saves and continues to the next piece.  To encourage users, the museum site uses healthy competition as a motivator.  There is a scoreboard to track your ranking among others weekly, monthly, and for all time.  Since this was the beginning of the week, it was easy for me to make the top 10.

You will notice that the scoreboard has a column for verification.  All the tags completed by the public go to a group at ArtUK to verify them.  This is how they control the accuracy of the tags.  Of the 213,013 individual tags, 112,248 are still waiting for verification.  It is wonderful to have the public helping but it does seem that the museum doesn’t have enough staff for the verification process they have put into place.  This is probably a common side effect of this model.

My own experience in completing work for ArtUk was that tagging was a challenge due to the inability to enlarge the images to look at the detail.  I had to use the magnifying window tool to zoom in on the image and then zoom out to type in my tags.  This is why I didn’t go crazy with tagging which is something I do enjoy.  To accurately tag some of the artwork like the textiles, you need to see the detail.

I can see the benefits of crowdsourcing to help with these types of tasks that ArtUK uses.  However, I had to ask myself though why people would come here to help.  Creating a collection was like building inspiration boards on Pinterest.  I could see the appeal to art students to curate their collections.  And some people love good healthy competition with tagging.  They do have people helping them as they are behind the tagging verification.  Part of me wonders if it would be easy for ArtUK to tag things themselves instead of doing the verification process.  They are still having to touch every piece of work. 

ArtUK’s online collection is very impressive.  It was a fun experience working on the site and it was a good way to get the art community involved to make the data meaningful to the world.