Curation vs. Consumption

The Digital Humanities Manifesto asserts that the shift to new media "recasts the scholar as curator and the curator as scholar" (8), an idea that I'm still considering. I'm curious to see where we might take the possibilities for scholarly curating in the digital age. The work of curation seems immensely valuable for tackling the endless stream of information which we, and our students, encounter daily. Incorporating curation projects into the classroom could certainly help develop skills of evaluating sources, identifying connections, and understanding the effects of display, juxtaposition, packaging, etc.

My concern, though, is that curating, especially if it is something we're asking of students, might devolve into something more akin to collection and consumption. In the process of searching, selecting, and grouping there is definitely a sense of ownership (especially when displaying) that at its best, I would imagine, would really motivate students and help them feel connected to their work. At its worst, though, it is ownership in a very negative sense, in which everything is so easy to access, so easy to alter, so easy to see/read/consume, that the values and differences between the different sources fall away - if everything is something you can "collect" and display on your blog or your facebook page, then the link to the news of a firefighter's death in the LA fires this week is at risk of being no more significant than the link to a video of a skateboarding dog.

What does successful scholarly, analytical, digital curation look like? How might we evaluate the success or analytical depth of curation? How does a viewer/reader follow a curator's analysis?



Just as a sidenote: I'm not sure what to make of the rebus style of the manifesto. It's sort of charming, in a let's-not-take-everything-so-seriously way, and yet it also comes across as though the authors just discovered a CD of clipart. Perhaps I'm just a little weary of web cutesy-ness (ie, social networking as ice cream sales, etc.)?