Digital History workshop: Crowdsourcing in the Humanities and cultural heritage sector. Victoria University of Wellington 23 April 2013 Session: This is not a penis: User-generated tags Presenter: Rasmus Thogersen http://wtap.vuw.ac.nz/wordpress/digital-history/events/crowdsourcing-workshop/presenters/

1. This is not a penis:
Professional descriptors VS game-generated tags
Crowdsourcing for the Digital Humanities and
Cultural Heritage Sector, 23 April 2013
Rasmus Thøgersen

2. Games With A Purpose (GWAP)
“Rather than using computer vision
techniques, which don’t work well enough, we
encourage people to do the work by taking
advantage of their desire to be entertained”
von Ahn & Dabbish, 2004
As an answer to
Image of Erik Kessel’s Photography In Abundance (2011)
removed, Image of Erik Kessel’s Photography In
Abundance (2011) removed,

3. Make a Difference

4. Comparison between
Descriptors
• Created by professionals with
specialized knowledge of both
the specific collection and the
wider context.
• Based on some formal
taxonomy
• Also fairly cost-intensive to ask
a trained librarian to index
~2000 images (or 18 million)
• Only one perspective
Tags
• Created by everyone
• A folksonomy
• Verified by other players
• Cheaper
• Probably flawed
• Chaotic and free

5. RQ1

6. RQ2

7. RQ1:
• More than 50% of the 3Vtags had a semantic relation to the Descriptors
• Approx. a third of the 3Vtags had a same/equivalence relation
• The second most common relation was the associative
RQ2:
• The vast majority of 2Vtags and 3Vtags were Objects/Artifacts
• The most interesting descriptions were found in the Free tags
• Vandalism do exist…

8. ?