Our annual meeting was the subject of a recent post on the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) blog. Thank you to the viz. team at the University of Texas, Austin for writing about us.

Now that we have entered year three of the Steve in Action IMLS grant, it is time to begin the documentation process. Our goal is to document both the projects created as a part of Steve in Action as well as the technical software information for anyone interested in social tagging. This will help to make steve truly open source and accessible to everyone.

Keene Haywood, Director of Research at the NMC will be leading us in this effort. A wiki has been created to gather the data for this process. All of the partner institutions will be contributing pieces related to their projects.

If you have software documentation skills that you would like to contribute to this effort, please contact the Steve in Action Admin team. We would love your help!

The Steve Annual meeting was held on October 26th, 2010 in Austin Texas, just before the MCN Annual conference. It was a great day! The group consisted of team members from almost every museum in the project. We spent the morning reviewing the work completed over the past year. Next, the development team gave a demonstration of all the new features that have been built into steve. At midday, the group engaged in two round table sessions where the project partners all demonstrated their projects to their peers in small groups. This was a great opportunity to engage with the projects and provide feedback to our colleagues. Every project is so different. The deployments have truly demonstrated how wide a range of applications that this tool has.

In the afternoon, the group discussed a couple of important topics including deployment and evaluation considerations, what will happen beyond Steve in Action, and the Life Cycle of Tags. These discussion may be best summarized by the beautiful graphic facilitation illustrations created by Rachel Smith.

Exciting news! The Steve in Action Annual Meeting for 2010 will take place in Austin, Texas on Tuesday, October 26. We are excited to host the meeting in the hometown of the NMC.

image found on Flickr by Jim Nix / Nomadic Pursuits

The interim report for Steve in Action was submitted to IMLS for the April 30, 2010 deadline.

The report summarizes the work completed in the first 18 months of the grant. It includes details on the development team’s work, provides an overview of the partner museums’ project plans, and lists the presentations the team has made about the project.

Download the April 2010 Interim Report here:

Kyle has spent some time thinking about the Steve Search function and has made some significant additions at http://tagger.steve.museum/search. The wider interface allows more space for viewing the object’s thumbnail and metadata. Users may now sort results by a variety of categories including creator, created (date), medium, type or medium, and term. Saving a search is available at any time and the system updates the results based on your selection, without having to hit enter or “Do Search”. The interface feels clean and intuitive, attributes that we constantly strive for.

Take it for a test drive and attempt to find the amusing dog hat from the IMA or SFMOMA’s Marshmallow Sofa. Happy hunting.

Nice work and kudos to Kyle and the entire development team.

Over the past few weeks we have been working on getting the Steve REST API documented. For those developers on the project, this should help you to get the widgets up onto your individual websites and look into the inner workings of the tool. As for the rest of us who don’t speak in APIs, just know that it means that the IMA developers are documenting their work in a way that will allow anyone to use their tool. We love open source!

Most of the completed documentation covers the methods and how to use each one. The Steve in Action developers will be expanding upon this documentation as the project continues. You can access the documentation here.

There is also a new Google group to specifically address API issues/questions. Feel free to join the group and discuss your experience with the API. http://groups.google.com/group/sia-api

Be REST-ful.

While working on the LACMA-Rubin partner project, the development team jumped another hurdle with one of the most difficult requirements for Steve in Action; it is now possible to load metadata in languages other than English. The steve tagger can detect if a user’s browser is set to a language other than English and will display the metadata properly if the user’s browser is capable.

The development team will soon be able to accept alternate language tags as well, which makes it possible for a user to manually select the language their tags are written in. However, work still needs to be done on how to link the user’s locale with the metadata to avoid junk search results arising from the same combination of letters having very different meanings in different languages. (For example, “bat” means something very different in English, Dutch, or Arabic. ) This multi-lingual development opens the door for steve to be used in museums across the globe and assist in the accuracy of tags added to the tagger. Great work!

Exciting work has been started on a project called Tag by Tweet. Using Twitter as a data transport mechanism for tags, Tag by Tweet is the first push environment for steve. All tags harvested from the twitter account, @tagbot, are added into the tagger using the url in the message as the image’s unique ID. A user must @reply to @tagbot and include the url to add their tags. It will be fun to see the tool in action and be able to push artworks out to a museum’s followers and see what kinds of tags are returned.

Congratulations to the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas! They are the first partner museum to launch their project as a part of the Steve in Action grant.

At the McNay, 12 works of art will be the focus of their deployment of the steve project. Beginning in March, on Thursday evenings and select Sundays, McNay Teen Art Guides will assist visitors in tagging works of art in the galleries. They hope to us the tags gathered to enhance visitor engagement and to inform future interpretive strategies at the McNay, including labels, brochures, or audio tours. For more information, please contact education@mcnayart.org.