A Museum Without Walls: Realising the Potential of Crowdsourcing in the Arts

Project Description:

This Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project will study an innovative crowdsourcing initiative and its impact on an important new digital art collection. The Your Paintings Tagger has been created to encourage the public to add vital metadata to underpin and augment Your Paintings, a digital art collection hosted by the BBC that will soon contain a digital image of every publicly owned oil painting in the UK, a collection of 200,000 images. Both Your Paintings and Your Paintings Tagger will bring the public into close and interactive contact with publicly owned art that will be available as a complete collection for the first time. The main purpose of the study is to answer the question: what is the impact of inviting the public to tag paintings in this way? As an increasingly popular form of generating content and analysis from large data sets, research to discover whether crowdsourcing initiatives are successful, what are the costs and benefits of such an approach, and how these lessons are to be conveyed to the relevant communities for future endeavours is a high priority.