University of Wisconsin Milwaukee UWM Digital Commons Theses and Dissertations May 2018 Facets of Graffiti Art and Street Art Documentation Online: A Domain and Content Analysis Ann Marie Graf University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.uwm.edu/etd Part of the Library and Information Science Commons Recommended Citation Graf, Ann Marie, "Facets of Graffiti Art and Street Art Documentation Online: A Domain and Content Analysis" (2018). Theses and Dissertations. 1809. https://dc.uwm.edu/etd/1809 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by UWM Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of UWM Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FACETS OF GRAFFITI ART AND STREET ART DOCUMENTATION ONLINE: A DOMAIN AND CONTENT ANALYSIS by Ann M. Graf A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Information Studies at The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee May 2018 ABSTRACT FACETS OF GRAFFITI ART AND STREET ART DOCUMENTATION ONLINE: A DOMAIN AND CONTENT ANALYSIS by Ann M. Graf The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2018 Under the Supervision of Professor Richard P. Smiraglia In this dissertation research I have applied a mixed methods approach to analyze the documentation of street art and graffiti art in online collections. The data for this study comes from the organizational labels used on 241 websites that feature photographs of street art and graffiti art, as well as related textual information provided on these sites and interviews with thirteen of the curators of the sites. The goal of the research is to demonstrate the existence of a coherent domain of street art and graffiti art documentation that may in turn be used to inform the formal design of systems to record evidence of the art movement and the works. Open coding was applied to the organizational text used by the websites to reveal a set of four categories of descriptive facets. The categories are related to general aspects of the websites themselves, the supports upon which works are created or placed, the various types of works, and location information. There are several facets included within each of these four categories. When a website shared information about the site itself, most frequently on an about sub-page, this was analyzed for audience, explicit organization methods, motivations for creating the site, and art style vocabulary used. Audience and explicit organization methods were rarely shared. Motivations were coded as internal, external, or mixed with emphasis on ii internal or external. Art style vocabulary varies and is tied to motivations, but the most commonly named style is graffiti or a variant thereof. Sites that feature work from internally motivated sites feature the widest variety of art style terminology and tend to avoid use of graffiti and graffiti-related terms. All website curators that could be contacted were offered the opportunity to participate in an interview regarding website organization for graffiti art and street art. Thirteen interviews were conducted: one by phone, one by Skype, and eleven by email. The interview data reveals varying opinions on what terminologies or categories should be used to organize photographic collections of graffiti art and street art online, but there is general agreement that the name of the artist or crew (if known), the year of the work, and the location of the work are the most important facets. The curators demonstrate that the size of the collection, geographic focus, and scope of works featured will have an impact on how the site should be organized. The ontological formation of the domain of street art and graffiti art documentation is evidenced by the combined results of the website analyses and interviews. iii © Copyright by Ann M. Graf, 2018 All Rights Reserved iv To Bert Hartinger v TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT .........................................................................................................................................ii TABLE OF CONTENTS....................................................................................................................... vi LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................................................. xii LIST OF TABLES .............................................................................................................................. xiii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................. xiv Chapter 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................. 1 1.0 Introduction ................................................................................................................. 1 1.1 Background - Knowledge Organization .......................................................................... 2 1.7.1 Graffiti and Graffiti Art ................................................................................................... 5 1.2 Background - Street art ................................................................................................. 6 1.3 Local Urban Environment as Contextual Organization – Place, Ownership, Surface ...... 10 1.7.3 Public Art ...................................................................................................................... 13 1.4 Organic Organization Practices: An Ontology of Street Art .......................................... 14 1.5 Social Organization and the Hierarchy of the Streets ................................................... 16 1.6 Social Semantics ......................................................................................................... 18 1.7 Definition of Terms Used in This Research................................................................... 19 1.7.1 Tagging .......................................................................................................................... 20 1.7.2 Discourse Community ................................................................................................... 20 1.7.3 Curator .......................................................................................................................... 21 1.7.4 Documenter .................................................................................................................. 21 1.7.5 User ............................................................................................................................... 21 1.7.6 Collection ...................................................................................................................... 22 1.7.7 Metadata ...................................................................................................................... 22 1.8 Summary and Conclusion ........................................................................................... 22 Chapter 2: Literature Review—The Research Problem ................................................................ 25 2.0 Introduction ............................................................................................................... 25 vi 2.1 KO Studies of Specific User Communities .................................................................... 26 2.2 Organization of Online Collections and Websites ........................................................ 28 2.3 Street Art Studies Useful for Description of Artworks .................................................. 31 2.4 Problems Specific to Street Art Documentation in Contrast to Traditional Art Documentation ................................................................................................................ 33 2.4.1 Ephemerality ................................................................................................................. 33 2.4.2 Little to No Institutional Support .................................................................................. 34 2.4.3 Context - From Onsite to Online .................................................................................. 36 2.5 Justification of the Use of the Term “Community” ...................................................... 41 2.6 The Proliferation of Media - Precursor to Online Collections ....................................... 42 2.7 Taxonomy of Terms .................................................................................................... 45 2.8 Summary .................................................................................................................... 48 Chapter 3: Methodology ............................................................................................................... 50 3.1 Research Questions .................................................................................................... 50 3.2 Methodological Paradigms: Domain Analysis and Content Analysis ............................. 51 3.2.1 Domain Analysis ........................................................................................................... 51 3.2.2 Content Analysis ........................................................................................................... 51 3.3 Quantitative Analysis of Website Capture Data ........................................................... 52 3.3.1 Selecting