Analysing user motivation in an art folksonomy

Abstract

The perception of art is a subjective affair - being influenced by our feelings, education and cultural background. Contrary, the study of art history uses formal methods to classify artworks. This discrepancy often poses a risk of being insurmountable -- especially for users without prior knowledge of art history. The concept of social tagging provides the possibility to merge art historical information with the subjective perception of users. For our art Web platform explorARTorium, social tags augment exiting art historical information. In order to better understand how social tagging is best applied, it is necessary to examine the user's motivation to assign tags. We adopt the differentiation between users who are motivated by categorizing, and users who are motivated by describing resources. By evaluating our folksonomy according to this paradigm, we show that the preference for certain artworks has an effect on the user's tagging motivation, whereas the presentation of an artwork does not. While measures exist that are able to identify the user's motivation for annotating artworks, we propose an heuristic that aims to classify categorizing, respectively descriptive, tags. After evaluating this proposed heuristic, we show that it is indeed possible to identify categorizing and descriptive tags, even though the results are somewhat biased by the content of the resources and the individual tagging behaviour of the users.