Published March 28, 2019 by Bowdoin College Museum of Art

Announcing the Launch of “Cratylus”

image of landing page of Cratylus app

 

The Bowdoin College Museum of Art is pleased to announce the launch of a new crowd-sourced tagging system called Cratylus, designed by David Francis, academic technology consultant, in coordination with Honor Wilkinson, curatorial assistant and manager of student programs, and in conjunction with the staff at the BCMA. The program is designed to be a gamified meta-data collection interface, that allows participants to explore thematic groups of Museum collections and apply related keywords from a set of controlled vocabularies from the Getty Research Institute. The inaugural theme is “Art and the Environment,” inspired by the current interdisciplinary exhibition Material Resources: Intersections of Art and the Environment. As the participants apply tags in association with individual objects, the Museum collects these tags in a database that will allow the objects to have greater searchability on the Museum’s collection page. This exciting new step in the development of digital resources at the BMCA will not only strengthen the accessibility of the BCMA’s collections, but will offer a fun and engaging way for participants of all backgrounds to contribute to the Museum’s publicly-sourced metadata. Try out Cratylus at https://apps.bowdoin.edu/cratylus !