Surveying Experts for Culturally-Informed Search Strategies

The Rhizomes team has been busy with qualitative investigations of search strategies related to Mexican American art.

Co-directors, Connie Cortez (UTRGV) and Karen Mary Davalos (UMN), along with operations manager and data curator, Mary Thomas, organized a series of activities directed at uncovering search strategies. Since conventional strategies obscure or render invisible the art attributed to people of Mexican heritage, our goal was to explore how these essential culturally-informed search strategies might improve the discovery of Mexican American visual art. Mexican American Art Since 1848, our portal, not only recognizes the knowledge of experts (including those with lived experience), but it will also reconcile conventional codes and Eurocentric classifications with culturally-informed descriptions of Mexican American art. Such a process will also insure that novices and the general public will also be able to effectively use the portal. Our findings are listed below.

These investigationes were funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Henry Luce Foundation.

Our Process / Our Methods

We gathered together over twenty-five content-experts and analyzed how they search for, describe, and categorize art. This group was mostly comprised of the National Advisory Council but also included some of the most important curators and stewards of significant collections of Mexican American art, such as Cesareo Moreno and Rebecca Meyers from the National Museum of Mexican Art (Chicago, Illinois), Tey Mariana Nunn from the National Hispanic Cultural Center (Albuquerque, New Mexico), Rebecca Gomez from the Mexic-Arte Museum (Austin, Texas), and E. Carmen Ramos from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.). In addition to activities designed to illuminate how content-experts search for Mexican American art, Mary Thomas also created a visual tool with fourteen images that allowed the group to examine vocabularies and cultural-codes that experts employ when describing and contextualizing Mexican American art. With this visual tool, the group worked in homogeneous teams—all curators in one group and all arts educators in another group, for example—and heterogeneous groups. The heterogeneous groups revealed unconscious biases and intuitive processes, whereas homogeneous groups formed descriptors that allow additional contextualization. The two-day meeting was revelatory and indeed lively.

At the end of the exercise, word-clouds were projected for the participants, which allowed for immediate sharing of results and preliminary, intuitive assessment. The sharing and immediate quantification of the results spurred rich and vigorous discussion, which we captured as additional qualitative information about search strategies, descriptors, and vocabularies. ChimeIn2 also allows for refinement by eliminating words that participants agree are insignificant, such as “help” or “use.” The refined word-clouds also generated discussion and relevant data, as new words received greater size and thus weight.

Our findings

In general, we found that content experts use the following -- many of which are culturally-informed words:

• period and geography specific terms (e.g., Hispano, tejano, tejana and Californio)

• historical themes, time periods or events (e.g., U.S. imperialism, Manifest Destiny, and the Rio Grande Valley)

• regional names of places (e.g., Aztlán, Nuevo México, borderlands, U.S.-Mexico border, and the Rio Grande Valley)

• culturally informed styles (e.g., domesticana, rasquache, mestizaje, borderlands, tortilla art, punkero) and American art styles

• culturally informed forms of art, (e.g., santero, piñata, and paper fashions)

• materials and graphic origins of  materials (e.g., corn, wood and wool from the Rio Grande Valley)

• critical concepts (e.g.,colonialism, settler colonialism, racism and sexism)

Most importantly, content-experts expect search strategies to indicate relationships between content, networks of artists, artist collectives, exhibition webs, social movements, and other works of art. We also learned that experts search using “first-degree terms” (i.e. artist name, style, period, year, collection, medium, artwork title, subject, theme) and second-degree terms (i.e. aesthetic influences, material referenced in the work, contemporaries, techniques, exhibition venue). These findings reveal that the affiliated metadata of the first- and second-degree terms are more comprehensive than “tombstone” information (i.e. artist name, year, medium, and artwork title) shared by most mainstream museums. These findings inform how we design the portal and its search capabilities.

Scroll down, and click to look at the list of over 100 culturally-informed vocabularies.