Entries by Erin

A Content Book Apart

I’m writing a book. It’s going to be called The Elements of Content Strategy, and it will be published by A Book Apart in early 2011.

If A Book Apart hadn’t been interested in this project, it wouldn’t be happening. This isn’t “a content strategy book” slotted into their lineup; it’s a specific project conceived to take advantage of their ambition, editorial chops, and unswerving commitment to their readers.

Which is to say: I’m writing this book because I think we’re at an inflection point.

Yes, content strategy is a real thing that real clients and employers really need. But beyond that, we’re in the infancy of a ubiquitous internet—one fully integrated into our lives and environments. The publishing world has been bitten by a radioactive wombat, and we don’t know if journalism’s going to die or mutate into something speedy and awesome. Our brains are changing in ways we don’t understand. Content work matters—yes, now more than ever—and as this thing spins faster, we’re going to need every advantage we can find.

Some propositions:

  • Our practice revolves around a set of shared assumptions, grounding principles, and professional ethics. These are every bit as important as the tools and methods we use.
  • We don’t have time to reinvent everything, and we don’t have to. Our discipline is rooted in old-school, long-lasting professional fields that offer practices and approaches we need and can immediately use. This also means that people from these allied fields make great candidates for content strategy positions.
  • Just as porn built the internet, commerce has been the impetus behind the development of content strategy; we have to get commercial content right. We must also remember that our educational, cultural, and governmental institutions are increasingly dependent on the online world. These are not afterthoughts or fluff jobs for idealists, and they demand that we know how to be user advocates.
  • The economics of content is our problem, after all. Unless we understand resources and costs, we can’t build sustainable publishing processes, teams, and systems.

My aim is to produce a short, clear reference that deals with the roots, principles, core skills, and central processes of content strategy in ways that content people will find helpful, and that designers, information architects, and project managers will be able to use as they work with and around content.

This is where you come in. I’m finishing up the draft of the manuscript now. If there’s something you want to know about content work, but aren’t getting from your current resources, let me know. This is a short book, so I won’t be dealing with anything comprehensively, but I don’t want to miss whole areas of interest, especially for people who don’t do actually content work. So leave me a comment or find me on Twitter or send a note to erin@ this domain name, and I’ll do my best to give you something you can use.

Author name:
Erin
Publish date:
August 18th, 2010
Discussion:
15 Comments
Categories:
Content Strategy
Editorial Strategy
Writing

Curation Conclusions

In the previous posts in this series, we’ve looked at “curation” in two ways: as a term for the filtering and mosaic-style storytelling bloggers and other web writers do by collecting links, and as a way of thinking about long-term content stewardship.

In case you missed any parts, here they are:

Curation as Storytelling-via-Filter

This revivified form of link-blogging is getting loads of attention as an easy way of (somehow) making money and expressing a personal vision. Here’s the 10-second version of my posts on this sort of curation:

  • Content curation is not a quick fix or a cheap way to solve your content problems, because if you do it well, it takes time, and if you do it badly, you’re already losing.
  • If content curation fits into your overall content plan, then by all means, do it—but commit to doing it well. It’s only by trying to do it better than anyone else that you’ll create something that continues to interest your readers after the first rush of interest has subsided.
  • “Feed the beast” is not a strategy. If your content plan revolves around creating huge heaps of content, then unless you have genuinely accepted the long-term responsibilities and expenses of a publisher, you probably need a new plan.
  • If someone tries to get you to pay for curation tools or services, remember that this is just one part of what bloggers have been doing since the late 1990s, and budget accordingly.

And one more for content people, specifically: we shouldn’t be jerks to people who do real curation in museums and galleries. Their work isn’t sacred, but neither is it trivial, and using their jargon without understanding where it comes from is a dilettante’s move.

Digital Curation (aka TL;DR)

If there’s one thing that researching and writing this series has pounded into my head, it’s that this web thing we do is not an isolated, special activity. A valuable and immediately useful inheritance is ours if we look beyond our ring-fenced specializations.

To people who aren’t already neck-deep in things like enterprise content strategy and document management, digital curation may seem intimidatingly technical or unwieldy. But until we routinely leave our clients and projects with a solid understanding of long-term publishing and content management costs, needs, and processes, we’re glossing over a really important part of content strategy.

Our natural allies in digital curation, information science, and museum work offer us the chance to learn about field-tested tools and approaches. We should take it.

How to Win at Internet

If you can use the second kind of “curation” to plan for and get more out of the work you do with the first kind—by “curating” your own content as well as that created by someone else, by reusing your work in smart ways, and by creating digital storage and tagging structures that support new publishing activities—you’ll almost certainly have created something sustainable and genuinely useful.

What’s Next

I realized after about the second post that I wasn’t going to be able to talk about anything like the full set of resources I’ve been using, lest the length of my posts turn all of you to stone and get me kicked off the internet. Rather than making a giant list of links, I’m just going to post short discussions of curation-related resources and how I’m using them as an informal series over the next few months.

Big thanks to all of you who commented, wrote thought-provoking posts and emails, and retweeted the crap out of this, and to Peter, who skillfully edited my posts on the fly, even when they were much too long. Unicorn-colored space princesses, every one of you.

Author name:
Erin
Publish date:
August 17th, 2010
Discussion:
1 Comment
Categories:
Content Strategy
Curation
Editorial Strategy

Slouching Toward the Curatorial

(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

    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

    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.

    Unicorn looking in window

    In folklore, curators may be lured by virgins and the scent of freshly baked bread. (Image source.)

    Notes & References

    1. “From Knowing to Not Knowing: Moving Beyond ‘Outcomes,’” by Andrew J. Pekarik. Curator: The Museum Journal, Vol. 53 Issue 1. 105 - 115 (28 Jan 2010)—This journal is paywalled, but the linked article may be downloaded without signing in or paying. ↩
    2. Photo of To Be With Art Is All We Ask… from this article; more on Gilbert & George; Anne d’Harnoncourt on the notion ↩
    3. I will, though, point out an essay on art and distraction that I’ve returned to several times: “Pictures, Tears, Lights, and Seats,” by John Walsh, former director of the Getty. Walsh’s essay was published in the Antioch Review and is accessible as a PDF via any library with a solid JSTOR subscription. It has also been collected in James Cuno’s fascinating and sometimes horrifying collection of essays by the directors of major art museums, Whose Muse: Art Museums and the Public Trust. The essay is excerpted in part, sans illustrations, on Google Books and via Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature. ↩
    Author name:
    Erin
    Publish date:
    August 3rd, 2010
    Discussion:
    3 Comments
    Categories:
    Curation

    The Curate and the Curator

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

    The previous two posts in this series discussed the notion of content curation as it relates to “real-time curation” and the filtering/mosaic method of online content production. I’ll be adding on a related post with examples of what I consider to be especially useful and successful examples of that genre, but first, I want to look at another kind of content curation—one that I think is vital to the work of content strategists.

    Note: If etymology isn’t your thing, just skip down to the next section, because I’m going to geek out for a minute.

    Everyone Loves the OED

    From Latin cura (“care”), through a tangle of mostly Old French, we inherit the English nouns “curator,” “curate,” and “cure,” as well as “accurate” and—less felicitously—“sinecure.” The OED‘s first definition for “cure”  is simply “Care, charge; spiritual charge”; from this, it’s an easy step to the care of souls performed by the curate. Long before the medieval English curate, however, Rome conferred the title “curatores” on a wide range of caretaking bureaucrats:

    Under the Roman Empire, the title of curator (“caretaker”) was given to officials in charge of various departments of public works: sanitation, transportation, policing. The curatores annonae were in charge of the public supplies of oil and corn. The curatores regionum were responsible for maintaining order in the fourteen regions of Rome. And the curatores aquarum took care of the aqueducts.1

    To this list we may add the curatores alvei et riparum, who had the care of the navigation of the Tiber; the curatores kalendarii, who kept the account books on the investment of public funds; the curatores ludorum, who oversaw public games; and the curatores viarum, who counted among their ranks Julius Caesar, and kept the Roman roads.2

    In the middle ages, as English began to evolve into its modern form, the curator reappears as the spiritual caretaker of the Christian church in England. Because I am a nerd, here’s one of the two attestations from Piers Plowman that the OED uses to date the term’s entry into English:

    For persones and parish prestes that shulde the peple shryue, Ben curatoures called to knowe and to hele, Alle that ben her parisshiens. (Our parish priests, whose duty it is to hear the people’s confessions, are called ‘curates’ because their business is to know their parishioners, and to cure them.)3

    As David Levi Strauss puts it, “one could say that the split within curating—between the management and control of public works (law) and the cure of souls (faith)—was there from the beginning. Curators have always been a curious mixture of bureaucrat and priest.” It’s worth adding that while parish priests were caring for their parishioners’ souls, the inhabitants of medieval monasteries and convents were doing an impressive job of creating, collecting, and keeping safe the written records of civilization.

    St. Dominic

    Curators. Keeping roads, books, and souls since 30 B.C. (Image source.)

    It’s not until the 1660s that we begin to see the word’s modern sense—which the OED has down as “The officer in charge of a museum, gallery of art, library, or the like; a keeper, custodian”—and again, we have a wonderful first attestation, from the diary of the very entertaining 17th century diarist John Evelyn:

    We tried our diving-bell, or engine, in the water-dock at Deptford, in which our curator continued half an hour under water. . . .

    Words cannot describe how much I enjoy the idea of that curator’s job.

    Curators Take Care

    Two young men with homemade diving bells

    Take us to your content.

    So how does this relate to the work of a content strategist? If we shove aside all the hoopla about “real-time curation” for a moment, the relationship is quite clear. Here’s Kristina Halvorson, from the Brain Traffic blog post about curation:

    As content strategists, it is in fact our job to sort through the wasteland of content—both online and within the organizations we serve—to find the really valuable assets, to organize them in meaningful ways, and to ensure they’re properly cared for over time.

    Another commentator focuses on the last part of that statement, noting that real curators care for, rather than about, their collections.4

    This distinction gets to the heart of content strategy’s strongest connection to the work of professional curators, which is that most of our work, particularly with large organizations, involves planning for the ongoing assessment, management, storage, indexing, distribution, and display of content.

    In an A List Apart article from last year, content strategist Erin Scime points out some of the connections between editorial and curatorial work:

    As if hanging art, the editor-as-digital-curator thoughtfully examines how to strengthen primary content (editorial features) by positioning it with related content elements to support a thesis. But it’s not just that simple. Unlike physical gallery space, the web is a far less constrained space which offers access to multiple dimensions of content at once. . . . That said, juxtaposing timely and timeless content is something that few sites do well—but with this digital curation frontier, there are essentially open skies for exploring this potential in page design and how related content is served up to users.5

    Erin also includes examples of sites that take a curatorial approach to their content; the NYTimes.com Topics site section, the Times’ multimedia productions, and the New Museum’s online space, Rhizome, which preserves and displays digital works are especially relevant. I would argue that in addition to relying on the usual information management techniques handed down by librarians, any organization with more than a few hundred pieces of content can also benefit from a curatorial approach to information collection, contextualization, and display.

    Which isn’t to say that a retail display = curation. In the comments that follow Erin’s ALA article, Margot Bloomstein reminds us that marketing people already have a word for the design of product displays—”merchandising”—and that when we’re discussing the “curation” of product-related content, it makes more sense to switch vocabularies (a distinction that may prevent us from going too far down the path of curated ladies’ underpants):

    [I]t strikes me that when articles, news, and information are the main wares of a site, the content strategist can adopt the practices of a merchandiser as well. Retail merchandising brings together products to make new meaning through context. Put all the red items together in a window display, and voila! It’s time to shop for Valentine’s Day! Mix together pens, folders, and lunch sacks, and look! It’s time to go back to school! As content strategists, we may more easily communicate ROI for “merchandising” content, especially for retail clients . . .6

    Confession Time

    Museums and libraries are the physical manifestations of cultural impulses I treasure above nearly all else, but that’s not why I’ve been writing this series. One of the reasons I’ve been thinking so much about curation is because I’m working with Happy Cog Studios and Ralph Appelbaum Associates on the redesign of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s website. As my colleague Whitney Hess has written, this is, for many of us, the project of a lifetime.

    Working with the Museum’s across-the-board brilliant staff7 has been an irreplaceable chance to understand how differently a single organization’s teams and divisions may approach its collections, all while maintaining a very consistent sense of responsibility toward the institution’s mission, audience, and purpose. As a result, I’ve been wrestling with the relationship of the content strategist to the collections of content within her care. In the next post in this series, I’ll touch on some of the principles and tools of traditional and digital curation that I’ve found most relevant to my work as a content strategist.

    Dessert

    Notes

    1. “The Bias of the World Curating after Szeemann & Hopps” ↩
    2. Dictionary of Greek and Roman antiquities. Ed. by William Smith. Illustrated by numerous engravings on wood. Smith, William, Sir, 1813-1893. Boston, [London, printed]: C. Little, and J. Brown, 1870. Digital edition here. ↩
    3. Schmidt, A. V. C. Piers Plowman: A New Translation of the B-text (Oxford World’s Classics) p. 251 ↩
    4. “Am I a Content Curator? A Content Surgeon? A Quontent Physicist?” ↩
    5. “The Content Strategist as Digital Curator” includes some statements about the nature of curation with which I suspect many new-school gallery and museum curators would take issue, but also includes a lot of great ideas for using curatorial ideas to strengthen content strategy work ↩
    6. Comment: “Strategy Makes Meaning”; curating panties ↩
    7. seriously—I don’t know how you get that many brilliant, hyper-competent, funny badasses into a single building without sparking some kind of atomic event ↩
    Author name:
    Erin
    Publish date:
    July 29th, 2010
    Discussion:
    2 Comments
    Categories:
    Editorial Strategy

    Between the Click and the Curator

    (Part two in a five-part series: Intro post. Part I. See also: “Credo: Addendum”)

    In the previous post in this series, I suggested that we in web-land tend to use the phrase “content curation” to refer to two distinct activities, and then talked a bit about how we got to the current state of collective hypervigilance about the filtering/mosaic form of content curation.

    Today, I want to begin talking about professional curators, what their work might have to do with ours, and how we can get better at our jobs.

    I Know It When I See It

    As noted extensively elsewhere, there has been a bit of a kerfluffle about the use of the term “curation” to refer to “real-time” filtering/link selection. Before we turn to the world of professional curation, I want to take a moment to acknowledge that we, the web-making industry, have been pretty careless with the term in ways that have—understandably, I think—got up some curatorial noses.

    For example:

    Content curation has emerged as a new and powerful way for marketers to seamlessly sift through the flood of content available to prospects. Like the owner of a high-end art gallery, you have to sift through the information from across the web and “curate” it to ensure that it is relevant to the customer.1

    In addition to abusing the human capacity for figurative language—seamlessly sifting a flood?—this comment implies that curation is a customer service process intended to ensure relevance. Many professional curators are doubtless interested in audiences, but I think most curators would bridle at the notion that their work centers on the act of culling irrelevant material.

    Another post provides a revealing glimpse of what curation means to someone immersed in the jargon of online marketing. Language nerds may wish to avert their eyes.

    Content marketing is the hype as it uses content as a currency to get attention of your audience or potential customers instead of paying for advertising. The main drawback of content marketing is the requirement of creating content. For most people creating new original content is just too demanding.

    Content curation is aggregation in context. Thus instead of creating content you only have to find, evaluate, sort, filter through the glut of already existing content, then copy and aggregate this content and publish it by your channel in a different format. . . . If you have some creativity adding on your own point of view is still possible in order to have some personal input.2

    If that doesn’t make you twitch, consider yourself uninvited to my slumber party.

    Finally, there’s Scoble’s now-famous info-molecule post, in which he explains that just about anything you do, up to and possibly including sneezing into a tissue, is curation:3

    Look at this post here, I can link to Tweets, and point out good ones, right? That’s curation. Or I can order my links in a particular order. That’s curation. . . . Or I can forward those links to you via email. That’s curation.

    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.

    Reading these posts, I can see why museum and gallery curators might reach for their revolvers.4 The New Curator post I keep linking to includes a reference to a small, informal survey about the primary function of a curator, and the article’s author reports that “not a single person said ‘selecting.’” I sympathize with the desire to distance one’s profession from seamless flood-sifting, but the survey responses did include the following, which hover awfully close to the practice of selection:

    Making choices.
    Steven Lubar, Director, Brown University’s Public Humanities program

    To help people sort through an excess of information/choices and to shed light on objects that might be missed; to sort wheat from chaff.
    Kirsten Teasdale, Museum Educator, The Conference House Assoc.

    Making choices, making predictions, making connections.
    Suzanne Fischer, Curator of Technology, The Henry Ford

    If these responses are indeed representative of the field, museum workers clearly do consider prioritization and—yes—selection to be an important part of a curator’s work. Not the only thing, but an important piece of the whole.

    The Alchemist

    Wordle illustrating responses to a New Curator survey on curatorial work

    Most of us can probably agree that making an ordered list doesn’t constitute curation in any meaningful sense, and I agree with Leslie at the Clutter Museum when she writes that you cannot simply “click to curate.” But somewhere between a grocery list and an exhibition, curatorial skills do come into play. So what’s the difference? Where is the transition between aggregation and something curatorial?

    Another handful of survey responses from New Curator provides the missing link:

    To act as ‘story keepers’ and to encourage people to interpret the world we live in from different perspectives.
    Catherine Manning, Curator at the Migration Museum, History Trust of South Australia

    Explore and create connections that artists, academics and the public do not (yet) see.
    Francesco Spagnolo, Director of Research and Collections, The Magnes

    To draw connections, bring meaning out of the seemingly meaningless.
    Emily Hummel, Public History MA student, American University

    Connections, meaning, story-keeping. Yep.

    Stories All the Way Down

    Maria Popova manages Brain Pickings, which is one of my favorite examples of content curation. She makes a good case for using the language of curation to describe the importance of the ability to recognize interestingness:

    Curation is all about pattern-recognition, seeing how various and diverse pieces of content fit together under the same taste umbrella or along the same narrative path, so the guiding principle has to be the sole storyteller with a strong point of view.

    And the art of curation isn’t about the individual pieces of content, but about how these pieces fit together, what story they tell by being placed next to each other, and what statement the context they create makes about culture and the world at large.5

    I think that’s an excellent formulation of the curatorial aspects of online filtering-as-storytelling. This sort of content work—that which relies on pattern recognition, storytelling, and the nebulous but centrally important quality of the good eye—is not an analogue of the much larger skillset of the professional curator, but it does aspire to the curatorial. And despite the denigration of “taste” as an element of curation, it does seem relevant: not in the sense of “good taste,” but as shorthand for a particular kind of predictive synthesis.

    An Aesthetic Science

    Some people can look at a roomful of nearly identical objects and pick the one dress, the one pair of sandals that will sparkle in the eye of a fourteen-year-old girl from Long Island. Similarly, some people can “just tell” which objects will be enhanced through juxtaposition with other objects. Their brains are doing a kind of pattern recognition that synthesizes zeitgeist and history and context and aesthetics and produces something that seems oracular. (Some people do it with math, and that one can really spook the crowd.)

    But these processes aren’t literally ineffable, they’re just complicated stories told in deceptively simple ways. Aesthetic “taste” is shorthand for the ability to go straight to the answer without consciously doing all the work required to get there. To some people, some things belong together, and when you put them next to each other, they tell a story.

    At its best, this kind of curation arranges units of content into an emotionally or intellectually compelling exhibition that is more than the sum of its parts. In reference to the failings of the controversial 52nd Venice Biennale, one critic discusses the alchemical potential of exhibition curation:

    The alchemy of good curating amounts to this: sometimes placing one work of art near another makes one and one equal three. Two artworks arranged alchemically leave each intact, transform both and create a third thing. This third thing and the two original things then trigger cascades of thought and reaction; you know things you didn’t know you needed to know until you know them; then you can’t imagine ever not knowing them again. Then these things transform all the other things and thoughts you’ve had. This chain-reaction is thrilling and uncanny.6

    Alchemy is such a great figure for this process: it walks and quacks like a science, but at the core, it’s all correspondences and symbolic resonance and story.

    That’s a piece of what one sort of curatorial work aspires to achieve. And if you ask me, it’s what we should hang over our desks as well, whether we call ourselves curators or bloggers or editors or tropical penguins. Whether the frisson is emotional or intellectual, if we’re not making the hair stand up on their arms in a flash of recognition, we have work to do.7

    In the social media world, posting an ordered list of tweets may feel like curating, but it’s a sad shadow of what curation can be. No matter how many top-ten content-curation skills lists are published, the human ability to spot patterns, synthesize contexts, and tell compelling stories will always be less like combining one atom of oxygen and two of hydrogen and much more like turning the symbolic base metals of the physical world into something that glows in the the mind.

    Doing It Wrong

    Given all this, it’s awfully fortunate that we have access to the world of traditional curation, and to people who have been thinking and writing about these skills and ideas for so long. Unfortunately, we’ve so far chosen mainly to ignore that world, except when we pop up to slander it. From an article on content curation written by someone who works in PR:

    There is a certain level of “intellectual snobbery” in existence from the point of view of traditional museum curators (the “purists”). Many museum curators have PhDs in their area of expertise, and believe that it is only with the highest level of education, and many years of research and experience, that one can be a true curator.

    Museum curators argue that, when applied to digital content, the term curation is a bit of a stretch, and that content curators are simply filters of information. Marketing influentials disagree and believe that, using a high level of industry expertise, content curators can provide the same value as a museum curator to their own industries.8

    This is what my maternal grandfather would have called horseshit. It’s an unacceptable oversimplification of a complex field that includes professionals with a wide range of perspectives, and unfortunately, it’s hardly the only example of this tactic.9

    If you don’t know what a “museum curator” does, as so many “marketing influentials” (which is so not a noun) clearly do not, how can you responsibly suggest that you will “provide the same value” in a commercial setting? The answer, of course, is that you can’t—that you’re relying on your readers’ short attention spans to keep them from noticing that you’re constructing a straw man, labeling it “CURATER,” and then alternately kicking it and suggesting that you’ve arrived to do its job.

    So let’s just stop.

    The Moral Obligation to Be S-M-R-T (er)

    If we pick three links on a topic and put them in a particular order, then no matter what we call it, what we’re doing is linking. This is what the web was built to do, and it can require a certain amount of focus and care. But if we genuinely believe that what we’re doing is curatorial, we should be ambitious for our work and intellectually curious for ourselves, and try to learn from the people who’ve held that title for so long.

    Luckily for us, we don’t have to rely on an dated cartoon image of a curator—or to keep guessing about what we imagine curators do and think—because there are plenty of professional curators having interesting conversations on the web.

    You could do much worse than to begin with the online writing of Elizabeth Schlatter, Deputy Director and Curator of Exhibitions at the University of Richmond Museums in Virginia. Schlatter has written several lucid and balanced articles about the response of museum and art curators to popular uses of “curation” by web people, marketers, and other groups of people not traditionally trained in curatorial work.

    Her article “A New Spin: Are DJs, Rappers and Bloggers ‘Curators’?” includes thoughtful and widely diverging perspectives from a range of professional curators, and is essential reading for anyone who wants to consider content curation within the context of traditional museum and gallery curation.10 Here, Schlatter quotes Troy M. Livingston of the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, N.C.:

    I think the threat to curators is that if we allow anyone to participate, will that lessen the value of what curators contribute? There’s a sense of resistance and fear perhaps in the curatorial profession because of this. [ . . .] The real difference between this idea of Curating 2.0 and traditional curating is scholarship. That kind of expertise to study objects and put together an exhibition for cultural and education purposes is very different than the kind of curating going on in Web 2.0.

    In another recent article, Schlatter considers the ways in which “real” curation (my term, not hers) is changing:

    the spectrum of what can be defined as “curatorial activity” is simultaneously being expanded in two diametrically opposed directions. At one end, the word “curate” is being used to describe myriad activities not pertaining to museums or art, while at the opposite end is the increasing specialization of the practice as exemplified by introspective theorizing and institutional criticism as well as proliferating academic programs.

    This climate of introspection within the curatorial world has provided a wealth of ways to think about the nature of real-time content curation. Here are just a few jumping-off points—you can expect quite a few more to appear in the remaining posts in this series.

    Curators on Curation

    The New York Times has a light but encouraging article on the current generation of young curators that serves as a nice introduction to the popular end of the curatorial conversation, despite including the hilarious phrase “taught classes in scholarly subjects like letter writing.” Easily twice as interesting, though, is the article’s superb multimedia companion piece, which includes brief audio interviews and images from exhibitions.

    One curator interviewed, Clara Drummond, returns explicitly to the storytelling functions of curation:

    I think you have to have an interest in storytelling . . . I mean, it’s sort of an old-school idea about what it means to be a curator, but I think that still stands—it really is about telling an interesting story.

    On the abstract/theoretical end of the spectrum, Maria Lind, director of the graduate program and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, ponders the scope of “the curatorial”:

    At its best, the curatorial is a viral presence that strives to create friction and push new ideas, whether from curators or artists, educators or editors. . . . The curatorial involves not just representing but presenting and testing. It is serious about addressing the query, What do we want to add to the world and why?11

    In a fascinating joint interview between controversial curator Jens Hoffmann and artist Julieta Aranda, Hoffmann situates his work in terms of “temporary alliances” between artist and curator that produce “grand narratives that are bigger than the sum of their parts: exhibitions with an epic dimension, if you will, which reconnect to my formative years as a theater director.”

    The relevance of these notions to practical concerns like the relationship between online content creators and the people who want to “curate” their work is obvious.12

    In a 2007 article, Hoffmann is more explicit in his consideration of curatorial work:

    Ask 20 people what they think a well-curated exhibition is and you will get 20 different answers. Curating remains a very young profession. It has not yet managed to develop a clearly defined identity, any form of theory or even standards by which to measure quality. This is further complicated by the fact that curating has diversified over the last decade. There are now multiple coexistent discourses on curating that are often not related to one another at all. Many have grown to be very sophisticated and specialized: from the art history–led discussions around collection displays and museum exhibitions to the debate around art in public space, and from the arguments around biennials to disputes regarding the idea of the so-called “creative curator.”

    Now that curating has become popular—just look at the number of curating courses offered around the world—in the general eye it is often simply understood as the practice of flipping through art magazines, walking through art fairs or biennials and selecting artworks that will illustrate a clever theme or idea that the curator has thought of. That curating is more complex—something that in fact has a lot to do with experience and the ability to be multi-talented—has not yet reached everyone.

    The curator should bring a sense of staging to the exhibition, with the intention of creating a unique experience for the audience and for the works of art. Above all, the curator should have a vision.

    I couldn’t agree more.

    The Alchemist

    Keep mixing, brother. (Image credit: William Fettes Douglas, The Alchemist.)

    More Paths

    References & Notes

    1. “Content Marketing: Definitions of Curation & Context” ↩
    2. “Why Content Curation Is the New Hype” Note: I have ignored the half-ass line breaks in the original in favor of a more legible format. ↩
    3. “Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators” ↩
    4. Yep, I’m going to link one more time to “You Are Not a Curator” because it’s such an enjoyable spasm of a post.

      Tangent 1: The original German is more like “I remove the safety on my Browning,” but scansion matters. Lots more on this here. And have some Mission of Burma, too.

      Tangent 2: newcurator reminds me, delightfully, of Albert Rosenfield. His path is a strange and difficult one. ↩

    5. “The Art of Curation” ↩
    6. The Alchemy of Curating ↩
    7. I’m reminded here of Walter Benjamin’s flash of telescoped perception:

      It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.
      —The Arcades Project, p. 262

      ↩

    8. “Content Curation: Bringing Order to Information Overload” ↩
    9. You might suggest that characterizing curators’ position on content curation as “OOZE” is also an oversimplification, which it is. The difference is that I’d be surprised to see anyone take my capsule summary seriously. ↩
    10. The article also includes an assertion I’ve seen several curators make, and which is, I think, based on a misapprehension about the reasons non-curators discuss their work in curatorial terms. Schlatter quotes an independent curator as saying that “The growing use of the term ‘curator’ in other fields, while misleading to many, fools no one who is actually in the industry and knows about the scope of activities that a curator undertakes.”

      It’s possible that somewhere, someone is using the term “curator” to try to ennoble their work or pull one over on someone else, but as far as I can tell, it’s much more commonly used either as a buzzword (a practice with its own interesting psychology) or a means of trying to find ways of talking about newly important activities. ↩

    11. Maria Lind on The Curatorial ↩
    12. See “Why Content Curation Is Here to Stay” for more on creator-curator spats ↩
    Author name:
    Erin
    Publish date:
    July 27th, 2010
    Discussion:
    3 Comments
    Categories:
    Content Strategy
    Editorial Strategy

    Credo: Addendum

    As I publish a short series of posts on content curation this week, it’s occurred to me that there are a few core assumptions I’d like to clarify in something like an addendum to the credo on my about page.

    • Content strategy is as obviously important in web development projects as UI design or project management. Someone must deal with content, and anyone who believes otherwise is unlikely to produce good websites.
    • The modern practice of content strategy arises from a number of venerable professions and takes its core principles from editorial, analytical, curatorial, marketing, and managerial work. This doesn’t mean that it “is” any of those things.
    • In particular, content strategy is not a subset of marketing. Marketing is one application of content strategy.
    • Many marketing people are brilliant, ethical, and very good at their jobs. Some are not, and their influence can be very destructive. The former group should not be held responsible for the actions of the latter, but we should not be expected to pretend that the latter does not exist. (All these statements apply to many other professions, but marketing’s the one I’m focusing on in recent and upcoming posts.)

    Onward.

    Author name:
    Erin
    Publish date:
    July 27th, 2010
    Discussion:
    1 Comment
    Categories:
    Admin Notes
    Content Strategy

    Curating the Deck Chairs on the Titanic

    (Part one in a five-part series. Intro post is here.)

    One of the snarls in the content curation discussion is a problem of definition: leaving aside the ethical, aesthetic, and logical questions about the relation of museum or gallery curation to the online world, what do we—web people—mean when we say “content curation”?

    Completists may wish to scan the Content Strategy Google Groups thread1 or the Brain Traffic blog’s curation post comments2 to get a feel for the definitional debate, but I’m going skip to the end: it’s pretty clear we’re using one term for two very different activities:

    1. Content curation as filtering, selection, remixing, or mosaic. When someone says “real-time curation,” this is what they mean. When someone tries to sell you “curation software,” this is the activity they propose to support.
    2. Content curation as the collection, preservation, and ongoing stewardship of content. There are about four people talking about this kind of curation, but those four people are very smart.

    Trying to discuss these two activities at once is like making cherries jubilee while hang gliding: fun, but eventually the wrong thing’s going to catch on fire and we’re all going to die. So I’m going to take them sequentially.

    Today’s post and its sequel concentrate on the first sort of content curation; the subsequent pair of posts will deal with the second sort. After that, there will be either a wrap-up post with mini-interviews or a long page of velvet paintings.

    Filtering Is What We Do

    Like the Japanese object-collection game Katamari Damacy,3 the internet is full of things. We need information mediators—spam filters, search engines, journalists, bloggers, friends, family members, government agencies, corporations, non-profits—to tell us what matters.

    Katamari Damacy

    The internet.

    Happily, information mediation is already a central human function. Our brains filter out vast quantities of sensory info and pass along the relevant bits so that we can function without being distracted by the texture of our tee shirts or the scent of the ink in our pens. We’ve long had human and technological information mediators in place to help us replicate this mental process on a larger scale, but as Clay Shirky has pointed out, these filters have begun to fail.4 And thus we see a host of automated, semi-automated, and human attempts to turn Way Too Much Information into Just Enough Information.

    This is all pretty straightforward until financial incentives rear up and send us careening into Bat Country.

    Social Media Ruins Everything

    “Content marketing” is a subset of online marketing and refers to the practice of publishing content online to attract the attention of potential buyers. At its best, content marketing helps organizations develop more useful content and fix broken publishing processes; at its worst, it boils down to such magical thinking as “social media will save you from the recession.” In either case, the field is made up of a voluble online community with the incentive to continuously reformulate its tenets to keep up with a rapidly evolving internet.

    Here are a couple of definitions of the filter/mosaic sort of content curation from social media and content marketing people:

    A Content Curator is someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online. The most important component of this job is the word “continually.”5

    Content curation is the act of continually identifying, selecting and sharing the best and most relevant online content and other online resources . . . on a specific subject to match the needs of a specific audience.6

    I define content curation as the process of assembling, summarizing and categorizing and interpreting information from multiple sources in a context that is relevant to a particular audience.7

    This sort of “curation” is an integral part of what bloggers, journalists, editors, and people with Tumblr accounts have been doing for lo these many years. Its recent cultural prominence is related to the rapid expansion of online publishing, but its sudden popularity on social media websites in particular can be traced to the moment at which organizations began to realize that “creating interesting content” is difficult, expensive, and highly competitive. As marketers sank beneath the weight of unrealistic content production schedules, some began to suggest that instead of creating content, businesses might simply quote from and link to content produced by others.

    And thus were born companies, experts, and products dedicated to automating a kind of content curation that—if done poorly—simply replicates the irresponsible waste of human effort represented by the portals of the late 1990s. Except, you know, in “real time.”

    Now Panic and Freak Out

    Many consultants have suggested that if businesses want to succeed online, they should become content curators. So should they?

    The simple answer is no. No one should reflexively pour time and money into “real-time curation,” because reflexes are a lousy way of making business decisions. Furthermore, when it’s used as a supposedly inexpensive substitute for a real content strategy, this kind of content curation is the definition of pounding sand down a rat-hole. You get tired and dirty while accomplishing nothing, and the rat has long since faffed off to watch Hulu. (There is a larger assumption at the root of this misapprehension of online content dynamics, which is that all companies should try to pump out as much “interesting content” as possible as a matter of course. But that’s a subject for another post.)

    On the other hand, done well, this kind of curation can be useful to readers and can therefore be an effective marketing tool. Of course, doing it well requires a lot of time and money along with (yes) actual human skill. And the good news is that if you have a real communication strategy and the resources to support an online publishing process, you’re probably already curating content.

    Doing It Well

    The social media/content marketing fuss about content curation may have led a few marketing teams down the garden path, but it’s been a great favor to the larger community of people who make, publish, and tend online content. We have an opportunity to discuss this subset of online editorial work with a large, passionate group of people from many disciplines—and to learn from actual curators, whether they’re thoughtfully writing about the nature of curation itself8 or suggesting that we all have our thumbs removed.9

    This matters because we genuinely do need to get better at this work. Our readers need it. Our clients need to know how to do it, and to understand the difference between doing it well and doing it poorly.

    And that’s what tomorrow’s post will be about. In the meantime, your homework is below.

    (Now online: Part II. See also: “Credo: Addendum”

    Bonus Smarts

    Notes

    1. Content Strategy Google Groups curation thread ↩
    2. Brain Traffic curation post comments ↩
    3. Katamari Damacy on TV Tropes ↩
    4. “It’s Not Information Overload, It’s Filter Failure” ↩
    5. Rohit Bhargava ↩
    6. Ann Handley, @marketingprofs ↩
    7. Paul Gillin @pgillin ↩
    8. “Talking Curatorial-ly” ↩
    9. “You Are Not a Curator” ↩
    Author name:
    Erin
    Publish date:
    July 26th, 2010
    Discussion:
    7 Comments
    Categories:
    Content Strategy
    Editorial Strategy
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