Squaring and Scripting the ESP Game.
François Bry, Christoph Wieser · 2012
ARTigo is a gaming platform with two goals: The development of a semantic search engine for art works and a study on art work reception. Even though ARTigo quite successfully achieves its goals, it is so far still deficient at collecting “deep semantics ” tags. This article first discusses why this is the case, then proposes two approaches we call “squaring ” and “scripting ” to collecting deep semantic tags that both consist in deploying the ESP Game in unconventional manners. Finally, the relevance of squaring and scripting for other GWAPs than the ESP Game is discussed. ARTigo: GWAPs for Art History Comparing and interpreting art works is at the core of art history whatever flavour of this many sided discipline is considered. To this aim, databases of art work photographs are very useful but, unfortunately, in most cases still difficult to fully exploit. Indeed, at best art work databases contain a few stereotypical descriptions such as the art work’s title, date, and artist that do not help much in discovering art works one does not already know. Since art works descriptions useful for similarity or semantic search are still out of the reach of image processing algorithms, art work database curators therefore rely on the tedious, expensive and not always bias-free indexing of art works by students and low paid manpower. As an alternative approach to indexing the art work of a database of more than 30.000 art works, we developed ARTigo. 1 ARTigo is a gaming platform offering so far an ESP Game [8] that, so as to collect tags ’ frequencies useful in our context does not prevent entering tags already assigned and a game with a purpose [7, 5] we developed called Karido [6] so as to collect more specific tags than those the ESP Game tends to collects [9, 2], thus complementing the ESP Game. Thus, Karido has the same objektives as Polarity [4]. ARTigo is rather successful: Within 4 years, we collected 4.03 million tags 0.855 million of which (21%) have been validated, that is, suggested by at least two players acting independently from each other. Furthermore, ARTigo succeeded in attracting an active community of 14.169 registered users and additional 26.428 unregistered users of which on every day at least 73 play 1