Wednesday 7 March 2007

Rhizome.org goes folksy

Folksonomy, that is. Terrible word.

Rhizome.org has announced that it has introduced folksonomy into its digital art archive ArtBase:

"In the past, all the works within the ArtBase were organized by a controlled vocabulary produced when the archive was founded. Last month, we introduced a hybrid model of controlled vocabulary and folksonomy to categorize the works. When artists submit works to the ArtBase, they choose from our vocabulary and add their terms. As artist-generated terms gain momentum and popularity, we will add them to the Rhizome Vocabulary. We have yet to determine the exact process for adding these terms, as we'd like to see how the new two-tiered system plays out."

What this means in practice is that artists can now give their works tags that they feel are meaningful, in addition to using the terms that Rhizome has available. It's interesting to see how artists are supplementing and contradicting the Rhizome terms, and also how many of the tags that are being added are the names of artists and associations.

ArtBase - Rhizome.org

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