Together with Thijs Waardenburg I submitted an abstract for the upcoming MuseumNext conference in Barcelona. A lot of interesting social media data on Dutch museums will be presented. The coming two weeks I will work on completing the Flickr data analysis and move on to Foursquare and Facebook. I cannot stress enough the importance of data. Especially when it comes to social media. Theory is fine but is being able to validate it with actual data. So fingers crossed that we can present our wonderful results and also a bit for my first trip to Barcelona.

What’s the Net Result?

Measuring and Analyzing Museums Social Media Activities

Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr, have enabled easy, inexpensive interaction between millions of individuals and communities. This has not gone unnoticed by archives, museums and other cultural heritage institutes, and is visible in a broad array of social media initiatives in- and outside of these institutes. For example, the fraction of museums in the Netherlands with a registered Twitter account has risen from 1.1% in 2008 to 34.6% in 2011.

The question is what all this social media activity brings. After almost a decade, there is still a great deal of trial-and-error. In the Museum Compass research project (www.museumkompas.nl) we have developed a social media monitor which contains data on all current and historic online activities on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare and Flickr of all registered Dutch – and some international museums. It allows us to map out the ‘online’ footprint of a museum, and is currently used by several cultural heritage institutions to position themselves online and reflect on their own social media use.

We will present the quantitative results from a range of Dutch and international museums, explore the possible qualitative and quantitative measures for such a monitor and discuss the usefulness of having enormous amounts of data. We will close with the lessons learned.

Download the full paper : Hekman, E. Van Vliet, H. 2011. Bringing the Past To the Present. Paper presented at the Consortium on Applied Research and Professional Education (CARPE) conference 2011.

1. Introduction

The growing impact of information technology and digitisation, ever since the beginning of the 1990s, has given cultural heritage institutions a fresh impulse to deal with the problem of accessibility of their collections (Van Vliet, 2009). Their efforts, however, are still mostly aimed at cultural preservation, and, for the time being, have done little to bring us closer to the dream of a Virtual Collection in the Netherlands. For instance, more than 30 million art objects were still not digitised in 2008 in the Netherlands (Veeger, 2008). Meanwhile, it has become urgent to further open the door. The Internet’s dominant role in recent years has caused a change in the relationship between media producers, suppliers and consumers in the traditional media landscape. The cultural sector must therefore decide what to do with today’s digital media in response to the general public’s changing role, and for the purpose of improving accessibility. The use of multiple media resources and particularly resources like the Internet and mobile telephony seems to be inevitable. The only question that remains is: how? This paper addresses this question by focussing on social tagging and storytelling, and reports the results of an empirical study on tagging behaviour using the social tagging platform www.ikweetwatditis.nl (see also Van Vliet et al., 2010).

1.1 Increase in accessibility

Searchability is crucial for the accessibility of our digital cultural heritage. The ability to find digital art objects begins with an effective description. Therein lies the problem. If a description can be found at all, it usually includes only a minimal amount of technical data focusing on object management issues such as documentation of the acquisition process, storage, and art-historical features. Often the same object descriptions are used when art collections are presented on the net. Consequently, any problems in describing the physical art collections are reflected digitally. E.g., as a result of strict annotation standards, the formal description of a painting with the image of a cow might not even include the word ‘cow’. As a result, the painting cannot be found using ‘cow’ as a search term. The art object may become less appealing for the visitor’s since it is taken out of context, and only a database record is shown (Trant, 2006a/b). In conclusion: art collections are available, but not accessible; descriptions have been made, but are incomprehensible.

1.2 Social tagging

The usage of social tagging could offer a possible solution for engaging the public and making object descriptions more public-friendly. Tagging entails assigning labels and/or keywords to a specific item, such as a painting. It is social tagging when multiple people are engaged in this activity, and tags are mutually visible. Various studies suggest tagging has a positive effect, on both the added value for art collections and visitor involvement with those collections (Marlow et al., 2006; Trant, 2006a/b; Trant & Wyman, 2006: Trant, Bearman & Chun, 2007). The frequently mentioned benefits associated with social tagging include:

• Tags provide access points that are closer to the idioms used by visitors than formal object descriptions.
• Tags add new information to art collections that is known to the members of the general public but that is not available to a particular institute (Trant, 2006a).
• Tagging increases people’s involvement with art collections: taggers contribute meanings that may provide insight into visitors’ perceptions of art collections.
• Tags can be used to personalize access to art collections by making suggestions, composing virtual expositions, route maps, or virtual meeting places for visitors (Van Setten et al., 2006; Trant, 2006b).

 2. Research questions

The question relating the useful deployment of social tagging can be formulated as: what choices museums have to make for the deployment of social tagging?

Two such choices have been identified for the purpose of this project. In similar research, researchers usually work with a dichotomy of professionals versus laymen. In doing so, there is little consideration of the different degrees of knowledge among visitors. In addition to the museum curator and the layman, there are ‘well-informed’ interested people including amateur scientists and retired professionals to be found among the visitors (see Wubs & Huysmans, 2006a). It is extremely relevant for museums to cater for and continue to involve this group in their collections. It may be more useful to deploy social tagging for a specific group of experts as opposed to a broad audience.

A second choice is whether or not to go beyond the limited power of expression of tags. No matter how powerful tags may be, they are still essentially keywords with a limited amount of information. It may therefore also be interesting to consider other forms of expression, such as digital storytelling. Stories offer a personal perspective and contribute to a personal interpretation of art objects (see further Van Vliet, 2009). We defined three possible effects of social tagging:

• Enrichment: tags enrich collections by way of adding information. Taggers make a statement about art objects and, as a result, tell us something about the relationship between visitors and art objects;
• Accessibility: tags can be used as search terms to find art objects;
• Involvement: the tagging process creates involvement. Through tagging the visitor is engaged in a process of viewing, analysing and describing the object.  One can expect that these cognitive processes will arouse interest in art collections.

The analysis of the three possible effects gave rise to a multitude of research questions and hypotheses (see Van Vliet et al., 2010). Two of these questions will be addressed in this paper.

Download the full paper : Hekman, E. Van Vliet, H. 2011. Bringing the Past To the Present. Paper presented at the Consortium on Applied Research and Professional Education (CARPE) conference 2011.

Tell me, and I will forget. Show me, and I may remember. Involve me, and I will understand ~ Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)

I’m in the final 24 hours of gathering data from Flickr the Commons. From the 191,683 photos (in October it was 188,772) 106,352 are queried through the flickr.photos.getInfo method. The script will ask retrieve data from 300 photos every five minutes. The Flickr API only allows 3600 calls per hours so better not cross that border.

Now onwards to some quick statistics from the 106,352 photos:

• 391 notes were added to 236 photos
• In total there are 516,387 tags
• From those 516,387 only 87,194 tags were added by Flickr members not belonging to the 56 participating institutes.
• From those 87,194 only 8,006 were unique tags.
• Only 3,218 photos have comments

As part of my PhD research I’m currently building scripts that monitor social media sites such as Flickr, Facebook and Twitter. Monitoring those sites will give me insight in the usage by museums and see which capitals (social, cultural, economical or strategic) they address.

The first step for me is to analyze the content of Flickr the Commons.

The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world’s public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.

You’re invited to help describe the photographs you discover in The Commons on Flickr, either by adding tags or leaving comments. (http://www.flickr.com/commons/)

In total 56 institutes are participating and uploaded 188,772 photos to the commons. The distribution however is not symmetrical. The Imperial War Museum shared 10 photos whilst the San Diego Air & Space Museum Archives shares a total fo 107,130 photos. Nevertheless the amount of photos and the amount of ‘possible’ interaction with the community is huge.

Today I will share the amount of photos per institute and next week I will update by showing the amount of tags and (hopefully) comments per institute.

As a proud Dutchman I totally agree

A special Seamail to Mark Zuckerberg… by the Dutch National Maritime Museum to announce its brand new Facebook page (search on FB for hetscheepvaartmuseum – or go to http://www.facebook.com/hetscheepvaartmuseum)

Mark, did you know there would not have been Facebook without the Dutch?

This brings back nostalgic memories. I miss the Internet from 1996. No fancy web services with jQuery, HTML5 or CSS3. Just basic HTML3 and 640×480 resolutions.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to download and read the research report from Culture24 focussing on museums and the Internet. Online strategy and how to measure online success were central in this four year during study.

Developing effective ways to define, measure and evaluate the success of online activities is an issue faced by all parts of the cultural sector. Organisations regularly invest in cultural websites, social media activities and online services without a clear idea of what the services are trying to achieve, or their intended audience.

The key findings of this research were:

1. Be clear ‘what’ you are trying to do online and ‘who’ it is for
2. Focus your online investment
3. Recognize the value, and the limits, of social media
4. Questions whether the web is enabling you to reach new audiences
5. Standardize methods of exporting online metrics to external stakeholders

This report couldn’t have come at a better time since I am also participating in a similar project in The Netherlands concerning museums and online/offline metrics. I’m currently creating lists of items one can measure online and creating web scrapers to obtain data from Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter and LinkedIn. My main goal is to monitor on a regular base the online activities of museums. Once we have gathered enough data it should possible to conduct content analyses. But first I need data!

Thanks to the research report I know we are on the right track and it gave me insight into some metrics I did not think of (e.g. Google Analytics).
Download the research report at WeAreCulture24

The idea of the virtual museum is not new. Many museums experimented with it for many years. From 360 degree panorama’s in QuickTime to virtual worlds in Second Life. It never really caught on in my opinion due to the lack of decent technology, internet speed, quantity and quality of digitized art. Now there is Art Project.

Google describes this innovative project as follows: The Art Project is a collaboration between Google and some of the world’s most acclaimed art museums. Powered by a broad, connected suite of Google technologies, the world’s great works of art and museums are now within reach to an unprecedented global audience. This unique collaboration enables people to discover and view more than a thousand artworks online in extraordinary detail.

Virtual visitors are now able to see the amazing detail of the digitized art and are able to retrieve more information about the object. I wonder how the digital versus the physical gaze upon the Mona Lisa will be experienced.

The third desire

It is said that the three ruling passions in human life are the desire for property, the desire for power and the desire for prestige or status or esteem (Brennan & Pettit, 2004a). In their book The Economy of Esteem, Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit, depart with the idea that our desire for esteem is one of the driving forces of every human being. It is our intrinsic desire to have our fellow man think well of us (Cowen, 2005; Franck, 2007). They portray esteem as an object of desire and people are in a position to rationally demand and supply esteem. Esteem involves an attitude, not an action, and that it may, or may not be expressed in praise or criticism.

A minimalist version of the basic esteem relationship involves just two individuals: an actor A, and an observer, B. The actor undertakes some action, or exhibits some disposition, that is observed by B. The observation of this action/disposition induces in B an immediate and spontaneous evaluative attitude. That attitude can be either positive (esteem) or negative (disesteem) (Brennan & Pettit, 2004b).

Esteem is scarce and cannot be given away or traded in the ordinary manner, for there is no way that I can buy the good opinion of another or sell to others my good opinion about them. However the fact that esteem cannot be provided intentionally does not mean that people are incapable of voluntarily providing services that will facilitate the appearance of esteem (Brennan & Pettit, 2004a).

Three types of services are suggested that facilitate the exchange of esteem: attention, testimony and association. These three services seem to resemble activities distinguished within social media. Could social media act as a marketplace for esteem?

Social media a marketplace for esteem?

Let’s consider the following: one could publish content on e.g. YouTube, Flickr or Twitter to make an active demand for esteem. I may choose to give attention to that content by viewing it and supplying esteem or disteem to the person who published that particular piece of content. On top of that I may choose to express my opinion in the form of a comment, adding it to my favorites or giving it five-star rating and thus supplying esteem or disteem.

The latter form of supplying esteem or disteem seems altruistic however, by commenting I too make an active demand for esteem. My comment could get noticeable attention and people will form an opinion about my small contribution. I’m also in the running for some additional esteem. Since I publicly associated myself with the content in a certain way, I too could get a share of the esteem generated. The esteem generated by the publisher could bestow upon me. Could the latter be the reason why people publicly identify themselves with A-list celebrities or politicians on e.g. Twitter?

It seems that social media could act as a marketplace for esteem yet its interdependence must be further researched. And though it would seem that esteem is a key value, it would be shortsighted to claim it is the only value generated using social media. AWT (2007) suggest there are other value systems active within the world being: economical, societal, cultural and democratic. Can the marketplace for esteem generate other values?

Esmée Denters, an 18-year-old girl from the Netherlands is a good example of someone starting out with an active demand for esteem and eventually ending up with economical value. By posting homemade videos of herself singing, she generated a lot of esteem within the YouTube-community. After nine months record companies noticed her popularity. This led to a singing contract in August 2006. Another example is the usage of social media by Dutch politicians during the 2010 election campaigns. Twitter was the weapon of choice for online political debate and esteem and disteem was generously demanded and supplied through the esteem services attention, testimony or association. Apart from esteem, democratic value was created since these political debates are publicly visible and others are able to join them (AWT, 2007).

Other values can be created by using the Internet without esteem as a starting point. Amazon.com, for example, successfully digitized the physical activity of selling material goods and thus creating economical value. In comparison, the music industry was less successful in creating economical value by digitizing their assets. It seems that esteem, economical, societal, cultural and democratic values do exist within the social media domain. However it is unclear if these were indeed the intended–instead of accidental–values for using or creating [social media] services. It appears there is no certainty about the expected value creation before the creation or usage of a [social media] service. Instead there is value creation during the usage of that particular service (Soete & Weehuizen, 2001).

Conclusion

The Internet matured into more than solely a one-way mass communication medium. Its social and economical implications however are still unclear and, while many observers allege that the Internet is changing society there is little agreement about what those changes are (DiMaggio, 2001). It is undeniable that in the recent years social media attracted a lot of attention yet there is little consensus about what social media precisely is, and what its characteristics are. Brennan and Pettit (2004a) give an analytical framework for the economy of esteem and there is reason to believe that it is indeed present within social media. Its interdependence still needs to be further researched. It would seem that esteem could be a starting point towards the creation of other values. Are these values intended and if so, can this be formalized in the form of e.g. business models? Solid scientific research within this domain is in order instead of merely guesswork. The Internet [and social media’s] rapid growth offers an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for scholars to test theories of technology diffusion and media effects during the early stages of a new medium’s diffusion and institutionalization (DiMaggio, 2001).

References

1. AWT. (2007). Alfa en Gamma stralen. Valorisatiebeleid voor de Alfa- en Gammawetenschappen.
2. Brennan, G., & Pettit, P. (2004a). The Economy of Esteem: An Essay on Civil and Political Society: Oxford University Press.
3. Brennan, G., & Pettit, P. (2004b). Esteem, Identifiability and the Internet. Analyse & Kritik, 26, 139-157.
4. Cowen, T. (2005). Review essay: The Economy of Esteem. Politics, philosophy & economics, 4(3), 374-382.
5. DiMaggio, P., Hargittai, E., Neumn, W. R., & Robinson, J. P. (2001). Social Implications of the Internet. Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 307-336.
6. Franck, G. (2007). Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit: Ein Entwurf: DTV Deutscher Taschenbuch.
7. Shao, G. (2008). Understanding the appeal of user-generated media: a uses and gratification perspective. Internet Research, 19(1), 7-25.
8. Soete, L., & Weehuizen, R. (2001). Nieuwe econonomie, nieuwe theorie? Tijdschrift voor Wetenschap, Technologie & Samenleving, 9(2), 49-53.