Metadata Games at Dartmouth University Help Tag College Photo Archives

From The Dartmouth (Student Newspaper):

Metadata Games, a set of two video games recently co-designed by digital humanities and film and media studies professor Mary Flanagan, will allow users to help staff members at Rauner Special Collections Library tag and archive thousands of photos when the software is released in summer 2011. The new open-source game will not only change how institutions archive data, but will allow people to utilize games as functional tools, Flanagan said.
Metadata’s development team — which consisted of students, professors, Rauner faculty members and workers at Tiltfactor Laboratory, the College’s game research facility — began working on the project a year and a half ago with a $50,000 start-up grant from the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities, Peter Carini, an archivist at Rauner and the content specialist for the game, said.
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Metadata Games is a suite of games including “Zen Tag,” which can involve one or two players, and “Cattygory,” which the developers tested for effectiveness.
“We focused on those two games because they were the simplest [and] provided a lot of input in a short amount of time,” Flanagan said.
In the single-player version of Zen Tag, an image is shown to the player and he or she is prompted to describe the image. In the two-player version, players gain points by having their opponent correctly identify a picture based on their tags.

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See Also: Direct to MetaData Games Info Page
See Also: MetaData Games Downloads and Info
See Also: Titfactor Homepage

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