Zhong C., Shah S., Sundaravadivelan K. & Sastry N. (2013) Sharing the Loves: Understanding the How and Why of Online Content Curation, AAAI Publications, Seventh International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, pp659-667 – http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM13/paper/view/6137 Accessed 15/04/15
This paper considers; Why people curate, how they curate and what others, namely followers of the content curators find useful.
“Curation might provide a personal value to the curators by collecting together items which might be difficult to find by other means” p659
They suggest that this paper provides evidence for Clay Shirky’s theory that “the job of curation is to synchronize a community so that when they’re all talking about the same thing at the same time, they can have a richer conversation than if everybody reads everything they like in a completely unsynchronized or uncoordinated way” (Shirky 2010).” Pinterest facilitates conversations (staff and students) allowing them to become visual almost immediately without the need to go to the library and spend ages filtering out relevant images to use as examples.
Pinterest allows “Structured Curation”p660 categorising content along with other similar items.
Macek J. (2013) More Than a Desire for Text: Online Participation and the Social Curation of Content. Convergence August 2013 vol. 19 no. 3295-302, Published online before print May 16, 2013, doi: 10.1177/1354856513486530 Accessed 30/03/2015
Suggests there are three factors for participation online 1. A will to text; 2. A will to self-performance and 3. A will to conformity
“these three factors then impact on the social curation of content – a reflexive process in which members of the audience construct texts for consumption and recirculation”p1
“When exploring participation in textuality performative self-exposure and self-presentation must be taken into account, as well as the context of the audiences everyday life.”p1
He uses the term “online participation of content”p2 and addresses are
- the creation and posting of audiences own content.
- reception of content made and posted by others.
- sorting and recirculation of content made by others.
This leads to a need to investigate definitions of participation. Macek suggests Nico Carpentier’s definition, reflecting “the fact that some crucial aspects of the audiences textual practices (potentially) have a participatory dimension since they are linked to power relations and decision making processes and can hardly be described as mere interactions.”p2
“The key issue in this respect is that the creation and posting of one’s content and the sorting and recirculation of that of others can be seen not only as the production of a text but at the same time as a performative self-exposure and as a performative exposure of taste and consumption. In other words, members of online audiences also share, narrate and circulate ‘themselves’ and representations of their life worlds.”p2
The will to text:
Online participation is not based solely on a desire to produce a text, however textuality is still central. Macek asks “first, What texts do people deal with and why?Second, why do they demand control over a text and how do they practice it?
He focuses on the everyday life of the audience and specifically the family
http://curationchronicles.magnify.net/video/Clay-Shirky-6#c=1RMHLF18HLLBQ6WK&t=Talk about Curation
“Curation comes up when search stops working,” says author and NYU Professor Clay Shirky. But it’s more than a human-powered filter. “Curation comes up when people realize that it isn’t just about information seeking, it’s also about synchronizing a community.”
Lowry C. (2010) Content Curators and Twitter: Earning Attention in the Age of Distractions. Communications 597: Psychology of Digital Media http://www.cheryllowry.com/portfolio/content-curation.pdf Accessed 12/05/15
Our problem is a short attention span, which remains fixed and limited in. A time of digital abundance.
A wealth of information crates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently.
Content curators locate, organise and distribute links to relevant, high-quality content online, voluntarily assuming a quality filtering role that traditional publishers once held.
Content curators are opinion leaders.
Within a closed environment and recommendation based structure an experts authority, reputation and presentation skills become more discoverable.
Lowry says ‘don’t just broadcast’ as one of his key strategies for building an audience. Could this be the same as don’t just pin, also re pin, therefore adding to the reputation of certain pins rather than adding to the pool.
Conclusions – his opinions
People need guidance, to focus their limited attention span.
Search engines do not provide adequate tools for this as they operate within too much noise, not enough filtering.
Experts are important still for guidance !? Authority is an important asset, however People’s attention is still held more by personal connection and credibility.
Abbott, D. (2008). “What is Digital Curation?”. DCC Briefing Papers: Introduction to Curation. Edinburgh: Digital Curation Centre. Handle: 1842/3362. http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/briefing-papers/introduction-curation Accessed: 21/05/15
As well as generating new data, scientists, researchers, and scholars have begun to rely on digital content created by others.
Digital curation is the management and preservation of digital data over the long term.
Talking about curation done by archivists, however not really discussing everyday curation of user created content, as per pinterest.
One of the major advantages of making data widely available is that it can be searched.
Mechanisms for quality control, authentication, and validation of data should form part of digital curation – again prioritising quality in terms of gatekeepers.