"David A. Shamma, Sara Owsley, Shannon Bradshaw, and Kristian J. Hammond. 2004. Using web frequency within multi-media exhibitions. In Proceedings of the 12th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia (MULTIMEDIA '04). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 536-539. DOI=10.1145/1027527.1027658 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1027527.1027658" In this article, we explore the structure of the web as an indicator of popular culture and its use in multi-media exhibits. In a series of art and technology installations, the software agency needs to keep 'grounded' to what people can readily understand. We administered a survey to understand how people perceived word and phrase obscurity related with frequency information gathered from a popular Web search engine. We found the frequency data gathered from the engine closely matched judgments gathered from people. The results of this study point to the new applications of the WWW in art and multi-media exhibits as an indicator of popular culture.

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