Curation
The art of creating value by providing context and meaning to apparently disconnected information bits
Robin Good and
Curation
Electronic Portfolios
simongrant.org"Agriculture made towns and cities possible, made it possible to meet and associate with far more people than was possible in hunter-gatherer tribes.
Eventually, poets could meet poets, artists could meet artists, and musicians, musicians. The potential of a group of competent musicians is so much greater than the sum of them all in ones and twos.
But large cities have been with us for thousands of years now, and somehow the advances brought on by civilisation seem to have run dry, and urban decay has begun to manifest.
Provided that people can still communicate and work together, the next step forward in human cultural terms might well be independent from physical proximity – it might be through association by choice.
Perhaps now is a good time for the better application of those information technologies that have been developed in recent decades, in supporting storage and reuse: not of food, as in neolithic times, nor even of money, where information technology applied to finance has enabled both wonderful and dreadful things.
It is now the turn of personal information to be the focus of the new technology – information technology – so that we can present ourselves and the values we have chosen to others, and let that information be used for the further positive transformation of society."
Kim Kardashian doesn’t wear archival Galliano because it’s expensive; she wears it because it’s impossible to obtain.
In luxury, scarcity drives desire, but contemporary scarcity is manufactured. Limited drops, seasonal exclusives, and numbered editions are ultimately all accessible to anyone with enough money. True archives are different. They’re... See more
In luxury, scarcity drives desire, but contemporary scarcity is manufactured. Limited drops, seasonal exclusives, and numbered editions are ultimately all accessible to anyone with enough money. True archives are different. They’re... See more
Why Fashion Is Obsessed With Archives
Unlike influencers, curators do not lead with self-exposure, but with interpretation. A curator’s authority comes not from personal relatability, but from perspective, context, discernment, and intellectual labour that has since been lacking in recent social media years.
the influencer won't last 2026. here's why.
Subsequent research by Gerstgrasser and colleagues at Stanford and MIT (arXiv:2404.01413) provides important qualification: model collapse is not inevitable if synthetic data accumulates alongside real data rather than replacing it. The pathological scenario assumes complete substitution—thoughtful data curation can prevent the worst outcomes.
Substack • The Cognitive Collapse Thesis: How Polluted Information Loops Are Degrading Both Machine and Human Intelligence—And What It Means for Capital, Power, and Civilization
…curators; like a museum curator pulling works together for an exhibition, they organize the avalanche of online content into something coherent and comprehensible, restoring missing context and building narratives. They highlight valuable things that we less-expert Internet surfers are likely to miss.
Kyle Chayka
Don’t get fooled. Although curation can save very significant time to those who benefit from it, it positively does not save any time at all to the curators who exercise it.
What we need is more support for the act of curation itself: Not just paying online creators for their content, but paying curators, sustaining the people who find what you like.
One Thing • ⬜ the Importance of Curation
Curation gives even mundane objects value by connecting them with a point of view, heritage, a subculture or purpose that makes them stand out in the vortex of speed, superficiality, and newness.
andjelicaaa.substack.com • Move Over Influencers, Here Come Curators
Museums act as filters for cultural abundance. Only so much can be kept within museum storerooms or displayed in exhibitions. Limited word counts on exhibition texts require the winnowing down of very large topics to the small and essential. Many core museum functions, from the selection of what objects and information should be kept through to... See more
Curating the Digital World: Past Preconceptions, Present Problems, Possible Futures | MW2013: Museums and the Web 2013
Influencing the world, by controlling the flow of information, is novel.