Object vs Subjective Metadata
Documenting human experiences alongside museum meta-data.
Indeed, this picture of code looks very boring! It’s a partly fake JSON datafile, which is a standard format for storing all kinds of data, such as meta data for museum collections. The ‘fake’ part that I put in starts with “subjective”. The data starting with “objective” is the standard metadata that accompany the digitized artworks at the Rijksmuseum database. This data is used to analyze and give access to the online collection.
Yet, pictures are made for viewing!
In this project you will design and conduct various online experiments to generate subjective metadata, but will also investigate how these types of data could be added to the formal data infrastructure of image collections.
Instead of viewing, there is only knowing, and we are going to change that by investigating how subjective data could be 1) generated and 2) used in online museum collections. The boring picture above shows two examples of subjective metadata: what parts of the image attract attention (“Eye fixations”), and what is the emotional association. This type of data is obviously generated by ‘user research’, e.g. experiments with online museum visitors.
