Curation
The art of creating value by providing context and meaning to apparently disconnected information bits
Robin Good and
Curation
The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators
Link
This is a guide for how we can build “info molecules” that have a lot more value than the atomic world we live in now. First, what are info atoms? A tweet is an atom. A photo on Flickr is an atom. A conversation item on Google Buzz is an atom. A Facebook status message is an atom. A YouTube video is an atom.
Thousands of these atoms flow across our screens in tools like Seesmic, Google Reader, Tweetdeck, Tweetie, Simply Tweet, Twitroid, etc.
A curator is an information chemist. He or she mixes atoms together in a way to build an info-molecule. Then adds value to that molecule.
Curating = Unpacking for a General Audience
Thomas B. Campbell, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, shares in this TED video, his journey to become a respected museum curator, and the valuable discoveries and insights realized along the way.
This passage, in particular, struck with me louder than a thousand words:
"We live in an age of ubiquitous information, and sort of "just add water" expertise, but there's nothing that compares with the presentation of significant objects in a well-told narrative... what the curator does, the interpretation of a complex, esoteric subject, in a way that retains the integrity of the subject, that makes it -- unpacks it for a general audience."
As information volume and complexity grew, simply keeping pace became a specialized profession. In other words, information specialists who do nothing but track developments in more and more narrow domains emerge.
Michael Simmons • Information Singularity: What Happens When Even AI Experts Can't Keep Up With AI
There is an extreme kind of philosophical skepticism – dating back to the ancient Greek Pyrrho – that there is no such thing as “truth” or the answer. We have only interpretations.
Into the brave and reckless hearts of explorers
The value of curation is in the interpretation for an audience
Replace every single instance of “synthesised strategists” with “curators” and everything will make much more sense.
In 1997, Malcolm Gladwell published his piece The Coolhunt, investigating the process of looking for new fashion trends at street level.
According to Gladwell, the coolhunter plays a major social role in spreading trends. Coolhunters were “the first to realize... that social status didn’t lay where Madison Avenue had said it lay in the 1950s and... See more
According to Gladwell, the coolhunter plays a major social role in spreading trends. Coolhunters were “the first to realize... that social status didn’t lay where Madison Avenue had said it lay in the 1950s and... See more
Gaby Goldberg • Curators All the Way Down
But why has the concept of curation risen to such prominence beyond the museum, and why now? For Steven Rosenbaum, curation “addresses two parallel trends: the explosive growth in data, and our need to be able to find information in coherent, reasonably contextual groupings” (Rosenbaum, 2011, 5). This latter need, to be able to find information,... See more
Curating the Digital World: Past Preconceptions, Present Problems, Possible Futures | MW2013: Museums and the Web 2013
The shift isn’t just about the aesthetic, it’s structural. As loneliness become endemic and public life becomes performative, people seek spaces with intention, coherence, and shared values. Curators, whether they’re running book clubs, shaping playlists, hosting salons, or steering micro-communities, they are steeping into a vacuum left by... See more
the influencer won't last 2026. here's why.
Technology treats the process of consuming and the process of creating as distinctly different, when the reality is that for our brains, the process of absorbing a book is not all too different from the process of producing one. We are always seeking new connections, combining and recombining old ideas to produce new ones. So why is it that we... See more
sari azout • Things I'm Thinking About
Curation as a bridge