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

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.

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.

More Paths

References & Notes

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.

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

“It’s impersonal,” goes the narrative. “It’s a buzzword.” “It takes all the humanity and warmth out of our stories and insights and makes them sad and grey.”

Tactical Fail

Here’s the thing. Most people who do content work have had a difficult time selling it, even to clients who desperately need it. We are just beginning to get mainstream companies and organizations to care about “Content Strategy” thing. This is not the time to go on a vision quest in search of a perfect, non-buzzwordy neologism to describe what we do.

More importantly, though, there’s nothing wrong with “content.”

There Is a Problem, and It’s Not the Word

The tradition of speaking about content vs. form goes back to Aristotle’s distinction between an argument (logos, pathos, ethos, and d’Artagnan) and its presentation (lexis). True, when we speak about “web content,” we mean both the ideas and their rhetorical formulation, but the leap from Aristotle’s breakdown to the one we use on the web—content, presentation, and behavior—is a small one. And in the context of the website-making world, it makes perfect sense to talk about “stories” or “insights” or “ideas,” however they’re presented, as content.

I’m a true believer about the power of crappy language to throttle the intellect and numb the conscience. And if you’re feeling lousy about writing or reading lifeless, perfunctory content that tastes like moldy cardboard, it can be tempting to blame it on the lexicon.

But “content” isn’t the problem. The problem is believing that quality is optional, that publishing more is automatically better, that this nonsense and its ilk are anything but an antisocial exploitation of a temporary loophole, or that paint-by-numbers content or social media or SEO or anything else is going to save your ass when you’re not creating something genuinely valuable.

People of Earth, Remember

Good content people, whatever medium they work in, understand that storytelling is the main way we get knowledge out of the head of one clever primate and into the head of another. They get that you need to sound human, and that the only way to do that is to BE human. Nothing the Cluetrain guys said in ’99 is any less true today, even if their neohippy lean got a bad reputation during the post-bubble dry spell.

Stop dithering. Go forth and make great stuff.

1. “Themes For A Good Infographic”
2. Eoin Purcell, “E-books are a Cul-de-sac”
3. Tim Meaney, “The Future of the Story”
4. Jonah Lehrer, “Attention and Intelligence”
5. Dave Currey, “How to Survive Geolocation’s Looming Apocalypse”

Bonus: “One of the problems with pageview billing is that it incentivizes publishers to distract you while reading.”

By the way, I owe you the third part of my paying for content series (part one, part two). Soon as I crawl out from under this content audit, it’ll go up. Bon week-end!

In the hands of a skillful communicator, visual content conveys information and ideas with extraordinary efficiency. In the content world, we pay lip service to non-textual content—and we do work with photographs, screenshots, and video—but how often do most of us get to employ custom illustration, diagrams, illustrative animation, or infographics?

Similarly, we’ve probably all drooled over the beautiful, intelligent communication work in Edward Tufte’s publications, but how many of us in content positions have integrated visual ideas into our early planning processes?

Traditional Uses of Visual Content

The winners of Science magazine and the National Science Foundation‘s Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge are excellent examples of the relatively common use of visual content to explain complex scientific or technical ideas to a popular readership:

As are these images, from New Scientist and the US Geological Survey, respectively.

Visual Content Requires New Tactics

The New Scientist poster demonstrates an interesting and web-specific problem in the use of visual content. Published in 2007, the image popped online in April 2009, and was passed around blogs and newsfeeds as an isolated image divorced from its context. It took me 15 minutes of Googling to find the article it originally accompanied. Much easier to find was a set of interesting critical remarks about the image and its implications; this is presumably not what the New Scientist editors would have preferred.

This example of disassociation from context illuminates a problem: content workers must consider the fate of visual content that breaks loose from its original home. Each piece of visual content needs to include a hook back to its source in case it gets passed around separately, as is increasingly likely in a web experience characterized by feeds, Digg, and tumblr.

A tangential but more important problem centers on the contextual information itself. When I finally did find the original New Scientist article, I found almost no details about the data represented, about the choices made by the image’s designers, or about meaningful connections between article and image.

The web, which gives publishers an opportunity to back up broad overviews with background content and abundant data, has also made it easier and easier for readers to spot fluffy, shallow approaches to communication. Visual content must not become an excuse for presenting only the eyecatching, the easily grasped, and the universally appealing.

Unexpected Visual Angles

Visual content can also communicate ideas normally buried in relatively dry text—ancient cosmological models, for example, can be liberated from Religious Studies textbooks by a great image, and artistic influences conveyed in a way that’s far more compelling and individual than the one more artist’s statement or lengthy interview Q&A.

The Cost of Visual Content

One reason illustrations and other visual forms of communication don’t often make it to the web is that it’s perceived to be too expensive. In reality, the expense is relative.

Good visual content can clear up confusion, strengthen brands, and make a website feel like a solid publication. Above all, it can communicate in ways and at speeds that text alone cannot. It’s a form of content worthy of serious consideration during the content planning—and funding—process.

Still not sure custom visual content is worth the extra money?

Consider the debate provoked by this image:

A paragraph of text or a data table would have been less expensive to create than the Obama administration’s visual story, but would have had only a fraction of the impact. The ensuing debate has revealed quite a lot about the strategic thinking that goes into visual content.

As content professionals, we’re working within a golden age of visual communication, and visual content offers us (and the people who hire us) an excellent opportunity to communicate more clearly. I know that I, at least, need to do a better job of integrating visual storytelling into my large content projects, and of advocating appropriate means of communication even when they cost a bit more up front.

Obama Hires Tufte

I wrote this article last week and set it aside to cool before posting. Since then, the White House has announced that it has appointed Edward Tufte to its Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. The administration has apparently realized what an extraordinarily powerful tool visual content can be in the communication of complex information—so why not bring in the best man in the game?

Brain Food