Taming Social Tags: Computational Linguistic Analysis of Tags for Images in Museums

Abstract

This paper reports on the linguistic analysis of a tag set of nearly 50,000 tags collected as part of the steve.museum project. The tags describe images of objects in museum collections. We present our results on morphological, part of speech and semantic analysis. We demonstrate that deeper tag processing provides valuable information for organizing and categorizing social tags. This promises to improve access to museum objects by leveraging the characteristics of tags and the relationships between them rather than treating them as individual items. At a high level, the paper shows the value of using computational linguistic techniques in interdisciplinary projects with museums and libraries.