Into the Zooniverse: Crowdsourcing Project Update

Time to venture into the Zooniverse!

On Friday, I had the privilege of presenting my ongoing work with the Bates Museum of Art at our annual student research conference, the Mount David Summit. I was placed in the Research in STEM presentation session, which I found a bit funny. The two presentations before me were on biology and neuroscience thesis research, so my talk was certainly something different!

To refresh your memory: I'm currently working with the Bates Museum of Art to develop a digital crowdsourcing platform to collect keyword tags for the almost 10,000 works in the Museum collection. The goal of this project is to improve the usability and searchability of the public-facing collections website, which is currently missing the keyword data that lets people search for conceptual terms.

Project Launch!

One of my motivations for presenting at Mount David was to recruit volunteers for the first test run of our art classification platform. We've finally gotten our Zooniverse site to the point that it can be shared with the public! I am so excited to see how this test run goes. We've decided to start with a subject set of 200 paintings, which will give us a good idea of how our current classification system is working.

If you're interested in looking at art and telling us what's in it, you can sign up here.

Podcast

A few weeks ago, I was asked to record for the newly-established Bates Museum of Art podcast! I had such a fun time talking about this crowdsourcing project, аs well as museum-y stuff in general. Check it out on our YouTube Channel or Spotify.

I'm looking forward to finally sharing this project with the public, and seeing what our data reveal about how people think about art!