Emotional Responses to Artworks in Online Collections

Artworks have a strong emotional impact on the visitors of an exhibition. Many museums and associations opened their collections for access on the web and have studied the potential of social tagging. User data collected by tagging in art social platforms are a precious information source about emotional responses to artworks and a feedback about the way in which users perceives collections. In this paper, we present our new achievements on this topic within the ArsEmotica framework. Our focus is on eliciting sharable emotional meanings from online collection visitors tags, by interactively involving the users of the virtual communities in the process of capturing the latent emotions behind the tags. We rely on methods and tools from a set of disciplines ranging from Semantic and Social Web to NLP. Such disciplines provide the building blocks for creating a semantic social space, where artworks can be dynamically organized according to a new ontology of emotions inspired by the well-known Plutchik's model of human emotions. The final aim is to involve users in the creation of such emotional space and, then, to offer them an emotion-driven access to the artworks.