Art Images and Multilingual Social Tagging: A Museum without Borders

Abstract

The use of social tagging for crowd-sourcing the annotation of images in online collections of art is in a nascent stage, but it has the potential to bridge language borders and reach wider audiences. How much do different language communities agree with each other when tagging images of art? This exploratory quantitative study is based on a collection of 24 digital images for which tags in Spanish and English were collected. The results show that when adding a second language for tagging images of art, the proportion of agreement among taggers does not seem to change significantly with respect to only one language.