Art Maps - Telling Tales of Engagement

Art Maps - Telling Tales of Engagement aims to further 'tell the story' of the impact of the Art Maps research project to a wider and differentiated audience.

Art Maps is a collaborative research project between Horizon Digital Economy Research (University of Nottingham), Tate (Tate Learning, Tate Online and Tate Research) and the Centre of Intermedia at the University of Exeter, exploring art, place and mobile technology.

About one third of the Tate collection, comprising almost 70,000 works, has been indexed with information about locations, typically the site represented. For some works this information is quite specific but in many cases it is quite general, referring only to a city, region or major geographical feature. The Art Maps project aims to improve the quality of the geographical data relating to these works, with members of the public contributing information, as well as to gain new insights into how people use mobile technology to understand their environment through art, and art through their personal histories in relation to location and mapping. By looking at a site in relation to artworks, users become more familiar with both the site and the art, explore how artworks relate to or differ from the sites they represent, how sites have changed over time, and how sites have been represented and experienced by different artists.

Over the course of 2012, Art Maps web and a mobile application were developed, allowing people to relate artworks to the places, sites and environments they encounter in daily life. Importantly, the new software enables audiences to explore ideas of site, place and location, environment, representation and memory, both on their own and collaboratively (for example, families, friends and schools). Art mapping, as audience engagement mechanism, was investigated through two workshops, held respectively in April and in October 2012 at Tate Britain in London. The preliminary results seem promising, and suggest a value for a further dissemination of the project to a wider and differentiated audience.

So, to further 'tell the story' of Art Maps, and through the support of Art Maps applications, we plan: to organise online events targeted at digital audiences, as well as Tate in-gallery activities (e.g. in the context of the "Looking at the View" exhibition); to co-design art-trails with the public; to involve the research community through interactive events. Broader public engagement will be also attained through the Art Maps presentation to other events (e.g. Science Festivals).

In order to maximise the impact, the project undertook a series of activities in 2012, grouped into: 1. Public engagement events at Tate Britain; 2. Publication of papers in conferences and journals; 3. Promotion through Art Maps partners' media and networks (e.g. Art Maps blog on Tate website; project abstract on Horizon and University of Exeter websites).

To further 'tell the story' of Art Maps, in 2013/14, we will: organise online events targeted at digital audiences and Tate in-gallery activities; co-design art-trails with the public; interactively engage the research community and the general public during academic conferences and science festivals.

We plan to create a direct impact on the use of digital resources, especially of 'peripheral' artworks, which are less accessed, as well as to support alternative paths of public participation. In fact, a priority of the National and European digitisation agenda (e.g. JISC Rapid Digitisation and Enriching Digital Resources programmes, EU portal Europeana) is to create new forms of public engagement through digital assets. In the research library and archive sector, it is reported that at least £ 130 million of UK public money has been spent in digitisation in a decade [1]. Despite the significant expenditure, it is hard to find 'evidence of use' of the digitised resources [2], and research shows that about 1/3 of the digital resources in the humanities are not accessed [3].
So, cultural institutions are progressively exploring alternative paths of collaboration with their digital audiences (e.g. Your Paintings; Transcribe Bentham; Pin a Tale). Art Maps represents an attempt to take art out of the institutional walls, supported by the capability of mobile technologies, and to create new ways to explore the Tate digital collections, as well as to discover new artworks and new artists, and thus to surface the many works from the collection that are not viewed online as often as they deserve to be. Therefore, we are planning both the organisation of online events for digital audiences, Tate in-gallery activities, and the implementation of art trails by the public with the support of Art Maps applications.

Furthermore, Art Maps platform is open source and can be repurposed by other institutions. It can support two activities in a way that requires minimal management by a system administrator: support for crowd-sourcing geographic information about a 'thing' (in Art Maps the things are artworks, but it could be something else); support for tracking user interaction with the system and activities undertaken by the users through blogging (users are encouraged to use their own blogs to write about their activities; the core system provides a centralized place to keep track of all of these blogs). Art Maps technology is implementable for other purposes and/or by other institutions. So, we plan to have an indirect impact through the dissemination of the platform in scientific events and through its potential adoption by other institutions for similar/different functions.

References
[1] Bultmann, B., Hardy, R., Muir, A., & Wictor, C. (2005). Digitised Content in the UK Research Library and Archives Sector. JISC/CURL Report.
[2] Warwick, C., Terras, M., Huntington, P., & Pappa, N. (2008). 'If You Build It Will They Come?' The LAIRAH Study: Quantifying the Use of Online Resources in the Arts and Humanities Through Statistical Analysis of User Log Data. Literary and Linguistic Computing , 23 (1), 85-102
[3] Warwick, C., Terras, M., Huntington, P., & Pappa, N. (2006). The LAIRAH Project:Log Analysis of Digital Resources in the Arts and Humanities. AHRC Report.