Henry Wessells of The Endless Bookshelf quotes on his site a particularly relevant passage on the production of meaning through scholarship and storytelling:

Someone has said that a first-class museum would consist of a series of satisfactory labels with specimens attached. This saying might be rendered : “ The label is more important than the specimen. ” When I have finished reading this paper, you may admit that this is true in the case of the little museum which I have here to show : a basket, a fascicle of plant fibres, a few rudely painted sticks, some beads and feathers put together as if by children in their meaningless play, form the totality of the collection. You would scarcely pick these trifles up if you saw them lying in the gutter, yet when I have told you all I have to tell about them, I trust they may seem of greater importance, and that some among you would be as glad to possess them as I am. I might have added largely to this collection had I time to discourse about them, for I possess many more of their kind. It is not a question of things, but of time. I shall do scant justice to this little pile within an hour. An hour it will be to you, and a tiresome hour, no doubt, but you may pass it with greater patience when you learn that this hour’s monologue represents to me twelve years of hard and oft-baffled investigation.

— Washington Matthews. “Some Sacred Objects of the Navajo Rites,” Archives of the International Folklore Association I (1898); scanned version available via Google Books.

The things in question had significance to the Native American culture from which they came, but not to their new audience. In this passage, Matthews serves as a mediator and the expenditure of his time is added to the objects’ aura,¹ marking their importance and worth.

This passage pinpoints my problem with “content curation” as the term is used by bloggers: Simply holding up three or four objects—virtual or otherwise—is no more telling a story than dumping flour, sugar, and eggs onto a table is baking a cake. You have to do the work of contextualization and storytelling if you want the objects to signify.

Tangent: Washington Matthews

Washington Matthews, by the way, was pretty extraordinary. He was a surgeon in the US Army from the 1860s through at least 1890, and became so well known as an amateur linguist and ethnologist that the Smithsonian Institution began sending him out to collect information on Native American languages and cultural practices.

It’s hard to get one’s head around what passed for anthropological “scholarship” on indigenous cultures at the turn of century, but the fieldwork of people like Matthews did more than expand the knowledge of scholars; it was part of the process of establishing for a colonial audience the cultural sophistication and common humanity of subjugated peoples.

In 1896, at a meeting of the American Folk-Lore Society at which the great anthropologist Franz Boas also delivered a paper, Matthews singlehandedly transformed academic opinion on Navajo culture and ritual (emphasis mine):

Dr Matthews referred to Dr Leatherman’s account of the Navahoes as the one long accepted as authoritative. In it that writer has declared that they have no traditions nor poetry, and that their songs “were but a succession of grunts.” Dr. Matthews discovered that they had a multitude of legends, so numerous that he never hoped to collect them all: an elaborate religion, with symbolism and allegory, which might vie with that of the Greeks; numerous and formulated prayers and songs, not only multitudinous, but relating to all subjects, and composed for every circumstance of life. The songs are as full of poetic images and figures of speech as occur in English, and are handed down from father to son, from generation to generation.

— “The American Folk-Lore Society,” The Critic. No. 725 (Jan. 11 1896), p 26; scanned version at Google Books.

The rhetoric is is very calculated, here. In addition to delivering a righteous smackdown to Leatherman, Matthews stakes out territory for Navajo art and culture that aligns them with that ultimate European cultural authority, the ancient Greeks. He’s making a case for the importance of his own work, of course, but he’s also positioning the Navajo as cultural elders, and he’s doing it without reference to the notion of the artless Noble Savage. Coming from a man who served during campaigns against several native tribes in the inland Northwest, that’s an awfully interesting position.

Notes

(Part four in a five-part series: Introduction, part I, part II, part III.)

Based on my own experience and the comments I’ve seen on content-related discussions of curation, I’m guessing that most content strategists who don’t come from the museum or art worlds don’t realize that there’s a whole field right across the hall (or perhaps in the building next door) that offers processes, perspectives, and a mature body of literature, all of which relate to our work.

My first inkling of this came early in a project I’m working on with Happy Cog Studios and Ralph Appelbaum Associates. The RAA team brought their content development process to a meeting and I brought mine, and we discovered that they covered nearly identical areas—though RAA’s was designed for years-long (and very expensive) museum projects and mine usually takes about four months to get through. As I mentioned in my last post, this kicked off a months-long reading project for me, including not only the official research conducted for the project, but the kind of unofficial, independent research I always do to try to get under the skin of a major project.

What I’ve learned so far has has helped me find new ways to think about my work and our industry. Not by providing a metaphor, a task for which nearly any profession will do: “Five Ways Content Strategy is Like Boxing” or “…Like a SWAT team” or “…Like Making Biscuits.” Unlike prizefighters, ninja-cops, or bakers but very much like content people, curators and other museum workers are engaged in the acquisition, protection, management, display, and reuse of objects that communicate with us, and they’ve been quietly publishing journal articles, papers, essays, and books about it for quite awhile.

For a nerd like me, this discovery feels like being handed the key to a secret library full of fresh-squeezed awesome.

One of These Things Is Not Like the Others

I am not suggesting that content people are or should be curators, but rather that many aspects of our work are naturally allied with curatorial practices and concerns. Our fields are fundamentally different in many ways—not least being that museum and gallery workers tend to handle tangible, authenticated objects with high cultural value, while content workers mostly deal with intangible, infinitely reproducible digital files—but we can nevertheless learn quite a lot from our older siblings who work in libraries, archives, and—in this case—museums.

A thorough consideration of curatorial work as it relates to online content would require far more information than a single blog post—or even a series of them—can usefully hold, so instead I’ve sketched out a few areas for consideration. The links I’ve included are the wee tip of a taste of the things we can learn from curatorial work, and my hope is that they’ll pique the interest of likeminded content people and begin to open up connections to this allied professional world.

Collecting and Managing Content

Because they handle rafts of physical and often precious objects, museum workers must use formalized and carefully considered intake, recordkeeping, and descriptive processes. Most of us in the content world have learned to use good content intake processes because anything else leads to near-immediate doom, but…

• What about processes for maintaining a real awareness of our content resources over time?
• What kind of data description, tracking, and reporting would that require?
• Are there ways we might use analytics, CMS tools, and good metadata to keep track of which assets we’re underusing?

And then there’s the practical question of format and storage. In the last 10 years, I have spent more hours stripping presentational elements out of content than I care to consider, and I know I’m not alone. We may have passed the tipping point for the separation of content from presentational markup, but given evolving markup languages, CMS quirks, and file storage requirements, it’s clear that our content management problems are far from over.

If you always have the luxury of working with a supersharp development team, you may not have to worry about it, but otherwise…

• Do you know what your database looks like?
• Does it store information in ways that won’t make things harder later on? Have you considered what “later on” might look like?
• Is it divided into chunks that allow easy redistribution in other formats?

…and did you know there’s a whole professional field dedicated to these issues?

On that last point, I should note that “digital curation,” as the term is widely used, isn’t a digital “version” of museum or gallery curation, but a highly focused subfield that deals with the preservation of digital data. More tech-oriented content strategists are doubtless already familiar with this field, but I suspect that many of us don’t know—as I didn’t know till this spring—that digital curation offers a very rich, accessible, and practical body of information on the long-term management of content. (The fields of library science and information management likewise—and perhaps more obviously—have loads to offer us, but that’s another post.)

Starting Points

• “What is Digital Curation?” from the Digital Curation Centre. The DCC considers “digital research data” to be the natural and proper target of digital curation efforts, but there’s no reason other data can’t be treated similarly.
• The DCC’s Curation Reference Manual in progress includes chapters on Appraisal and Selection, Archival Metadata, File Formats, Preservation Strategies, and much more.
• They also offer this stylish Digital Curation Lifecycle Model, a series of briefing papers clustered around topics including “Introduction to Curation,” “Standards,” and “Tools and Applications,” a blog, and an extraordinary list of external resources.
• The Digital Curation Exchange offers an excellent collection of resources for and about digital curation.
• There’s a dreadful website designed to accompany Ross Harvey’s new book, Digital Curation: A How-To-Do-It Manual. The book looks excellent, but it may be difficult to extract Harvey’s useful information from the publisher’s inaccessible pages.

Evaluation & Evolution

Long before web-makers began conducting usability tests and analyzing click patterns, museum workers were producing, evaluating, and revising exhibitions. (Department stores were doing it, too, but to rather different ends.) Serious, disciplined content evaluation that goes beyond split-testing and simple analytics is something we already know we need to get better at, as a discipline and an industry, so it’s only logical to learn from the ways in which professionals in allied fields conduct and use evaluations.

And lest we begin to doubt that our industry has enough in common with museum curation (and exhibition design and evaluation and so on) to make their techniques useful to us, I should note that the same conversations we have about agile development vs. waterfall and iteration vs. planning are cropping up in a slightly different form in the museum world:

Instead of thinking of the exhibition as a building that is planned in detail and then built, one would think of it as a living organism. It begins small, perhaps as a few displays set among others. As the exhibition team studies the ways that visitors engage with this embryonic exhibition, the team starts to invent methods for expanding it that seem likely to be fruitful, in view of what team members are learning about visitors and their responses. As the embryonic exhibition is revised and enlarged—perhaps doubled, let’s say—it is studied again, and yet again it is changed and built upon. The exhibition, in other words, evolves as the team’s understanding evolves in regard to what the visitor experiences and what the exhibition facilitates.¹

Sound familiar?

Many of the evaluation techniques used in the museum world will be familiar to web people who do a lot of analysis, but I’ve rarely seen web projects evaluated with such care and thoroughness.

Starting Points

• “Exhibition Evaluation Explained” from The Australian Museum, a succinct introduction to the subject.
• “Evaluation, Research and Communities of Practice: Program Evaluation in Museums” from Lynda Kelly at the Australian Museum. Archival Science. 4. (1-2): 45-69.—Freely downloadable as a touchingly imprecise scanned PDF.
• Chapter 10: Evaluating Participatory Projects, from Nina Simon’s wonderful new book, The Participatory Museum, which is available online in its entirety.
• The CUT (Content Usefulness Toolkit) Method of Content Evaluation from Clare O’Brien at Content Delivery & Analysis (video presentation), which provides a peek at some of the conversation happening in the online content world.

Presentation

Having immersed myself in museum-related books, blogs, and journals for a couple of months, I find that the ways in which I think about content presentation have changed a bit. Specifically, I’ve begun to recognize that the movement toward low-distraction design for reading, particularly as seen in tools like Readability and Instapaper, has a lot in common with the museum worker’s attempt to give people a chance to “be with art”²  in a quiet, low-pressure setting.

The typesetting techniques used in the tools I mention may have been adapted from print, but the notion of presenting content in a serene, undistracting format is related to the curator’s (and exhibition designer’s) role as aesthetic mediator and realisateur. It’s also squarely opposed to the all-quaking, all-flashing banner ads of our present web environment.

These last two points are not unrelated.

I’m not going to link to a bunch of research papers about presentation,³ as my point is that we should stop and think about the ways in which we present our content and the many reader-hostile practices we’ve decided to accept as necessary evils, even when they don’t solve business problems.

What Does It Meeeean?

Though we’ve been doing it for years, the formalized practice of content strategy is still finding its feet. As a result, we are under a certain amount of pressure to demonstrate the value of our contributions in purely economic ways—and that’s a reasonable thing to do, because our work is enormously practical and does indeed produce economic benefits.

But in this period during which our discipline is still malleable, we have the chance to define our work in ways that transcend the purely economic, and in doing so, we can take cues from related fields for whom the economic is (at least nominally) secondary. It’s clear that publishing and editorial work, marketing, library science, and information science are all somewhere on our family tree—and so too is the curatorial tradition as it’s found in galleries and museums.

Looking at these professional ancestors (and siblings and marriagable cousins) isn’t about trying to establish our work as Serious Cat through an appeal to authority, but about recognizing the wonderful fact that we don’t have to invent everything afresh or work in a vacuum just because we work on the internets. I hope that this series, which ends this week, can play a small role in turning our collective gaze outward.