The conversation about content strategy, online publishing, and all the subfields and specializations that surround them is flourishing. Wonderfully, it’s no longer possible to keep track of the posts, comments, talks, and events that take place every week within our world. And it’s not just that we’re voluble: our community is extraordinarily generous with knowledge, help, and professional support.

After benefiting from this conversation in so many ways, we’d like to give something back. A bounded collection of ideas and connections. A place to catch up with the movement of our fledgling industry and the much older fields from which it emerged. An editorial lens.

In this spirit, I am so pleased to announce that the first issue of Contents magazine will be online this fall. In it, you’ll find analysis, practical how-to information, essays, event information, and links to the most interesting things going on in and around our field.

Krista Stevens and I are joined in our editorial efforts by Ethan Marcotte, our creative director, and production director Erik Westra. Visit our temporary HQ to learn more, and follow us on Twitter for updates and info. This is going to be so much fun.

I wrote The Elements of Content Strategy because as the internet worms its way further and further into our lives, digital content becomes centrally important to the ways in which we live and work. And it follows that content strategy—the practice of planning for, designing, and managing content—is also getting closer to the center of both web projects and entire organizations.

So I wrote this book in the hope of providing a compact, useful reference—both for those of us already doing content strategy work, and for those who want to know more about working with (or becoming) content strategists. Like the two superb books that precede it at A Book Apart, Elements is meant to be a handbook, in the literal sense, which the OED has, charmingly, as “A small book or treatise, such as may conveniently be held in the hand.”

But it’s also meant to be a book kept close at hand for use during spells of intensive effort. In that way, it’s a book I wrote because I needed it myself, if only to remind myself of things I’d already learned: not just deliverables and processes, but principles, rationales, and traditions that might be called into service when weird new problems arise.

Old-School Publishing for the New World

What can I say about A Book Apart, except that they have been ideal publishers in every way? Jeffrey, Jason, and Mandy do extraordinary work with an attention to editorial rigor and design integrity that is unsurpassed in our field, or most others. It’s also a genuine honor to join Jeremy, Dan, and (soon!) Ethan on the ABA shelf.

Beyond this, though, I hope that the viability of A Book Apart’s approach is a sign of good things to come. On one hand, it’s a very new-school publisher, built on a web-based brand and the ability to sell books directly to readers with little friction. But on the other hand, it’s a very old-school house, built on editorial and design values too often abandoned by the traditional presses.

Many of my favorite books of the last few years have been published by small presses like Unbridled, Akashic, Subterranean, and the astoundingly great Small Beer, or by micro-presses like Temporary Culture and Graphics Press. In a moment of economic disaster for so many publishing and media companies, these presses demonstrate that old-fashioned editorial care is still viable if you make it the center of what you do. The existence of publishers like these, within our industry and outside it, fills me with optimism.

I am so grateful to Jeffrey, Mandy, and Jason for giving me the opportunity to write precisely the sort of book I wanted to write, and for making my manuscript into such a beautiful little object. I hope the result proves useful enough to reward their confidence.

Although I’d like to drag you all under the slightly crispy mistletoe for a big smooch, that would be weird and we’d all get colds. So instead, here’s a redacted but enthusiastic list of things coming up on my end in the first quarter of next year:

• A gobsmacking content-related project from Arc90 that I helped out with, a bit.
• The relaunch of Loosecubes, a coworking and indie work/life company. Content freelancers and indie people everywhere have much to look forward to.
• A new blog series dealing with professional ethics, responsibility, and breaking into the content world. (I’d planned to do it in December, but I’m just going to lie here under a glass of eggnog instead.)
• That book, which is even now being edited by Ms. Brown.

Also coming in early 2011: an enormous and juicy project for the content strategy community, built in collaboration with two secret co-conspirators you already know and love. More on that in January.

The Best Wishes I Have

To my friends and colleagues who’ve had a 2010 full of triumphs and weddings and babies and bliss, I raise a happy toast.

And to those of you whose 2010 has ranged from challenging to ghastly, here’s the thing: We’ve made it to this point—past the darkest day with special bonus total freaking eclipse—and on to the bonfires and champagne. So keep warm, take comfort where you can, and know that we think of you constantly.

A very sweet new year to all of you. Over and out.

Let her fix the content or she will maim you with these common office supplies. (Image source.)

A few weeks ago, before the snowpocalypse, I visited the lovely people at Brain Traffic in their Minneapolis lair. Now, a visit to Brain Traffic central is a lot like walking in on the planning session at the beginning of a heist movie, except that you don’t expect everyone to get shot in the end, and the fridge is full of cupcakes.

The thing about Brain Traffic’s people is that there are a lot of them. In one place. All of them scarily smart, and all working on content strategy projects as though it were a perfectly natural thing to do.

Specialization: Not Just for Insects

In the last ten years, I’ve had the extraordinary good fortune to work with some of the smartest and most talented people in the web world, generally as the only dedicated content person on a web design team. It’s been wonderful, personally and professionally, and I’ve learned a ton about other disciplines. On larger projects, though, I’d begun to wonder how much more I could accomplish for clients (and their readers) with a few more content people.

And in that light, the chance to collaborate with an entire, dedicated team of hardcore content specialists feels a bit like I’ve just discovered that there are OTHER EWOKS IN THE FOREST and they want to make Ewok observatories together and write comic operas.

Jub Jub

So. After a lot of talking and planning and snorting on G-Chat and Skype, I am very pleased to announce that I will be joining forces with Brain Traffic as a senior content strategist working from NYC.

Notes & References

In the post, I mentioned something I’d made for a client project: a diagram that traces the mental path we want to encourage a particular group of site visitors to take. Not specific interactions, pages or tools, but a process of gradual engagement with ideas, eventually leading to the decision to act. I’d never made this particular thing before, and I’d never seen anything quite like it elsewhere.

I can’t show you the thing I made, but here’s an example that I sketched out for an imaginary conservation organization that wants to educate students about habitat loss and related activism when they visit the site to complete school assignments.

Pretty simple, right? A project with a dozen or a hundred pages and only a few target audiences wouldn’t need something like this. But before I could proceed with the content recommendation for this large, complex, and intellectually crunchy project, I needed to distill all the things we’d been saying and thinking about this audience’s progression through the site’s ideas.

I made it as an internal tool, but when I showed a dim iPhone photo of it to client stakeholders, they found useful, so I ended up including it in my content recommendations.

A Diagram Named Sue

When I showed the client my sketched-out version on my phone and then hastily re-drew it on their whiteboard, I called it a “user engagement model,” which is reasonably accurate, but also jargony. In my blog post, I called it:

a cognitive model that translates pieces of the organization’s mission into a conceptual blueprint for deepening user engagement with the site

That’s both vague and awkward, but it does describe  the thing and what it does—or at least, what it did for me on this project. A Google image search for “cognitive model” produces a variety of hideously formatted diagrams about how people think; the one I made is also about how people think, and specifically how we imagine them thinking their way through the information presented on a website.

But because I didn’t have a non-proprietary example to post, the mention produced confusion. So just to be clear, I’m not talking about a mental model. Nor am I talking about “the features of an information system,” as one commenter suggested.

Have You Seen This Boy? He Is Very Ugly.

I’m certain that I haven’t created anything new by drawing up this diagram when I needed it, and I expect to continue using the tool on other projects that need a nudge toward clarity.

So here’s my question for you, internet: Have you made or used something like this? And if you did, how did you use it? (And what did you call it, anyway?)

Related

content strategy is to copywriting as information architecture is to design
—Rachel Lovinger

Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.
—Kristina Halvorson

And my newest favorite is:

Content strategy is just content planning.
—Elizabeth McGuane

Also, Rahel Bailie has a fantastic post about the definition of content itself.

In real life, content strategy falls somewhere between traditional editorial leadership, communication strategy, and information management, all of which have their own distinct connotations. It’s easy for discussions of terminology to float off into abstraction, so instead of talking about “content strategy” or what “a content strategist” does, I’m going to say what this content strategist does.

What I Do

Right now, I’m working on a few projects. One is very large and is a good example of a big, serious CS project, so I’ll talk about it in detail.

I’ve already collaborated on a quantitative and qualitative content audit for this project, which involved many thousands of pieces of content spread across several divisions and databases.

I’ve also already done high-level content recommendations, which included a description of major assumptions and concepts that would affect future content, structural design, visual design, and development choices. These recommendations included:

• a cognitive model that translates pieces of the organization’s mission into a conceptual blueprint for deepening user engagement with the site
• proposals for major new communication approaches and content-related features, including initial requirements for a proposed back-end system that would support specific kinds of content creation and management, all of which are linked to goals articulated by the client before and during the project’s initial phases
• audience prioritization and high-level plans for meeting the content needs of each of the site’s major audiences

Now I’m working on the next round of content strategy work, which will include:

• detailed discussions of the content in each of the site’s major sections, keyed to the wireframes that we’re developing—this includes clear documentation of the goals, style, format, sources, and upkeep needs of each major class of content on the site, and will eventually turn into content templates
• notes on new content that needs to be created and existing content that needs to be revised before launch
• a discussion of the editorial calendars (yep, plural) that will be in place before launch and will guide content creation and review in the future
• a snapshot of existing web publishing workflows in use throughout the organization and a discussion of new publishing workflow models and processes that the client may wish to adopt
• a discussion of underlying content-related business rules that affect workflow and content management
• a proposal for integrating appropriate, useful social/interactive features into various parts of the site

None of this work deals with all the content strategy aspects of off-site content, social media, email, mobile integration, and so on—we haven’t gotten there yet. Someday, there will also be a style guide, much of which will be integrated directly into the CMS and workflow documents so that people can actually see and use it. And all of this work happens in collaboration with the client, with the web consulting team I’m part of, and with a specialist consulting firm acting as our partner on this project.

Edited to add: This project also included a very substantial research phase, which was run by the UX team while I tagged along taking notes.

For two other clients, I’m collaborating on product development. For one of those clients, I’m also developing messages and writing copy. For another, I’m doing ad-hoc project management and sometimes general, old-school web strategy work.

Oh, a certain amount of staring off into space, which turns out to be essential for keeping the brain juicy enough to do all of the above.

That’s what I’m doing now. Strategic and tactical. Planning and execution. Also sometimes cake.

That Thing I Said I Wouldn’t Talk About

If you’ve read this blog before, you probably know that I’m an etymology nerd. It’s my main defense against ill-tempered, shortsighted prescriptivism. Here’s a little bonus geek-out.

“Strategy” is derived, of course, from the Greek word strategos, which means, roughly, “general” or “highest ranking military leader.” Strategos is derived from two other Greek words: stratos, which is used to mean “army” but literally means something like “the thing that is spread out” and agos, which means “leader.”¹ The OED, bless its adorable face, defines the modern sense of “strategy” as:

The art of a commander-in-chief; the art of projecting and directing the larger military movements and operations of a campaign. Usually distinguished from tactics, which is the art of handling forces in battle or in the immediate presence of the enemy.

Quite.

In Summary

The central message of content strategy in 2010 is that it’s not enough to think tactically about content. To serve our clients and readers, we have to look beyond individual battles and ensure that the whole array of individual campaigns and choices works together to meet a clearly defined set of overarching goals.

Notes

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

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.

In case you missed any parts, here they are:

• Intro: Content & Curation: An Epic Poem
• Part 1: Curating the Deck Chairs on the Titanic
• Part 2: Between the Click and the Curator
• Part 3: The Curate and the Curator
• Part 4: Slouching Toward the Curatorial
• Also relevant: Credo: Addendum.

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.

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

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

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

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

One of These Things Is Not Like the Others

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

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

Collecting and Managing Content

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Starting Points

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

Evaluation & Evolution

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

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

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

Sound familiar?

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

Starting Points

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

Presentation

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

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

These last two points are not unrelated.

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

What Does It Meeeean?

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

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

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