Grassroots Heritage

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“As curators we have great power to help shape our national memory.
It’s a power that we use judiciously and openly.
We have the power to determine which objects are saved and whose stories are told.”
– William Yeingst
September 11 Collecting Curator, Museum Specialist, Division of Social History

Curators play an important role in our society; they are the stewards of our history. Professional curators traditionally oversee a collection of artifacts and organize exhibitions at cultural heritage institutions. Recently, there has been a rising trend to use the notion of curation as a way of addressing information overload issues online. However, the applications and interpretations of curation by social web users are varied and often stray away from traditional curator roles. In this blog post, I explain the meaning of curation in the online world by distilling and then collating the diverse ways in which social web users describe online curatorial activities. I also introduce the concept, socially-distributed curation, to emphasize the distributed nature of this curatorial process emerging from the social web.

Information Inundation Leads to Curatorial Overload

In a networked world, we are increasingly inundated with information from the data streams that we encounter online as well as through social media sites. Ubiquitous online social technologies (e.g., blogs, wikis, social networking sites, media repositories) generate a plethora of user-generated content publicly accessible via the web. As we increasingly create personal collections online, we each face the problem of “curatorial overload: too much information, too difficult to organize and retrieve” (Van House and Churchill 2008, p. 297). People are also exponentially generating and sharing content publicly, and now we as a society are faced with this information management problem. Designing curatorial tools can help people sift through and make sense of these massive content streams in real-time as well as give civil society the opportunity to make collective, curatorial decisions about what historical content is worthy of being preserved and shared for posterity’s sake.

The Meaning of Curation in the Social Web World

I explain “curation” based on a distillation and collation of how social web users and professional curators explain the term curation in the online context. I collected and analyzed 100 web artifacts pertaining to curation issues in the social web world (i.e. blog posts, online news articles, and videos including the comments in these posts as well as examples of web services that claim to support curation). First, I began with a Google search on “curation,” which led me to two interesting blog posts: “The Content Strategist as Digital Curator” by Erin Scime and “Can ‘Curation’ Save Media?” by Steve Rosenbaum. I decided to organize these web artifacts for research purposes using Delicious, a social bookmarking web service that uses a non-hierarchical classification system for tagging bookmarks and discovering other people’s web bookmarks. Then, I searched for the tag “curation” within Delicious and found more web posts related to curation issues in the social web context. The links within the web posts that I had already collected led me to other relevant web posts on curation. Influential social web users and professional curators wrote many of these web posts. Their interpretations and applications of curation seem to be authentic, credible, and representative resources because they discuss the notion of curation within the context of the social web and based on their own experience and knowledge as participants in the social web.

You can find the 100 web artifacts that I analyzed in my Grassroots Heritage Delicious account with a curation tag: http://delicious.com/grassrootsheritage/curation

You can find the web artifacts that specifically relate to socially-distributed curation here: http://delicious.com/grassrootsheritage/socially-distributed

The Curatorial Process

Curation has become a constructive model and metaphor for offering a solution to the information overload issue online. I move away from a role-based definition of a curator and instead focus more on the activities and interactions that take place within the curatorial process. Below I describe seven different types of curatorial activities based on distinct roles often associated with curators found in cultural institutions. Many of these activities occur concurrently, feed into one another, and are carried out by multiple people simultaneously.

1. The ARCHIVIST: Curation consists of finding, collecting, and aggregating artifacts to create a collection. The goal here is to pull together a diverse set of artifacts from different sources in order to obtain suitable coverage on a particular topic.

2. The LIBRARIAN: Curation consists of organizing, classifying, and categorizing each item in the collection. The goal here is to catalog each artifact in order to create a taxonomy or a metadata structure using keywords and tags so that each item is easily searchable.

3. The PRESERVATIONIST: Curation consists of caring for, preserving, and maintaining the collection through stewardship. The goal here is to engage in preservation activities that engender long-term maintenance of and access to the collection for posterity’s sake.

4. The EDITOR: Curation consists of selecting, filtering, and verifying the items in the collection that will later be exhibited. The goal here is to sift through, prioritize, and assess the artifacts in the collection and then choose the most relevant, reputable, and meaningful artifact to share.

5. The STORYTELLER: Curation consists of weaving together the selected artifacts and then crafting a story that provides explanatory text or commentary. The goal is to communicate a message by explaining the artifact’s value and relevance in the context of the other artifacts.

6. The EXHIBITOR: Curation consists of displaying, arranging, and presenting a set of artifacts in an exhibition often by juxtaposing the artifacts in a purposeful way to tell the story. The goal is to carefully choose a medium and method that creates a compelling experience and evokes a response.

7. The DOCENT: Curation consists of community members teaching and guiding visitors through an exhibit as well as facilitating relevant discussions, reflections, and critiques. The goal here is to be the interlocutor between the artifacts in the exhibit and the viewers of the artifacts.

The purpose of categorizing these curatorial activities based on these seven roles is to make the diverse activities associated with curation more distinct. Many of the web artifacts discussed only a set of these activities or focused on a particular activity like filtering. Many of these artifacts also began alluding to curation as a more social and participatory activity particularly in the social web context.

Towards Socially-Distributed Curation

The curation process explained above has primarily taken place through institutions. However, there is a tension between the existing practice of institutionally-driven curation and emerging curatorial practices taking place through online networks. I call the latter socially-distributed curation, which is an adaptation of the “socially-distributed cognition” theory (Hollan, Hutchins, and Kirsh 2000) often used to analyze collaborative work practices by examining the interactions between people and artifacts in their work environment. I anticipate the need for a suite of tools to facilitate the seven different types of curatorial activities mentioned above but in a more socially-distributed way. Instead of one professional carrying out these seven curatorial duties, such duties could be crowdsourced through online social networks. A user may have ad hoc expertise on a particular curatorial activity, depending on their skill set and/or knowledge of the topic or event, and become one of the many users participating in the curatorial process.

Web Trend Map describes their service as high-quality curation plus aggregation. The way they illustrate Twitter users as micro-curators speaks to how each user engages in micro-curation. When you take a birds-eye view of the social web, macro-curation is taking place but in a socially-distributed way.

Curation is an active process of engaging with and making sense of artifacts. However, “many of us continue to be passive [preservers]” since organizing, filtering, and deleting often takes too much time and effort (Van House and Churchill 2008, p. 303). To facilitate active curation, archival preservation and retrieval needs to be in conjunction with “mechanisms that stimulate participatory engagement” (Haskins 2007, p. 407)

Moving Beyond Curators to Curation

Curation has increasingly become the buzzword for managing the problem of information overload in the digital age. However, it is important to recognize that multiple activities or duties are associated with the curatorial process (i.e. collecting, organizing, preserving, filtering, crafting a story, displaying, and facilitating discussions) and, at the same time, these activities are interconnected and feed back into each other especially when they occur in socially-distributed ways. We are beginning to see examples of software tools and web services, such as the ones presented here, that claim to support curation, but often such tools decouple these diverse curatorial duties.

Expanding and Critiquing the Curation Metaphor

I am interested in hearing your reactions and feedback to my interpretation of the curatorial process. If you provide any feedback, I would like to credit you for your contribution to this unpacking of the curation concept in the social web world.