Curating the Curators

Creative Review piece about the design of the Guardian

In recognition of the importance of design in helping people navigate the Guardian online, a member of the design team now sits with the newsdesk, helping to decide which template will work best for each story. “We do have someone now helping to curate the news, really visualise it to the best it can be,” says deputy creative director Chris Clarke. “Before it wasn’t nurtured like that, it was still very much that the paper was the heart of it. Simple things, from adding cutouts, to having a design eye and just being able to see pacing on that front page is really helpful.”

• curating the news as a visualising, shaping activity - interpreting a story for an online format
• designer ‘helping to curate’ the news by giving shape (allocating templates) to pre-selected stories
• to curate is not about choosing content or setting agenda
• curating as nurturing
  
• curating the news as having an overview, and an expertise in how to tell a story through medium it may not have been written for

source

• Curators and archivists as adversaries
• Curators allies to artists in methods and practice
  
• Curators as agents of deconstruction

“The successful candidate is likely to be a caretaker, a curator of the future. His or her task must be to breathe life back into politics, to recharge democracy with choice, to ignite the hope that will make Labour electable again."  – George Monbiot

• curator as caretaker, caring and maintaining things –  not about selecting and choosing things
• curator as god-like, breathing life into things
• curator as recharger, empowering things
• curator as ignition, re-starting things
• ok that’s enough now

From think piece by Stephen Feber at http://www.museum-id.com/idea-detail.asp?id=400

• argues that museums might collect code but will still create and show physical, rather than digital, objects
• optimistic about future of 3d printing
• identifies collecting as one of main activities of curators and the museum
• problematic assertion that there is an inherent value distinction between handmade and factory made objects (‘Real curators collect art and archaeology - not trains and boats and planes’)
• argues curators will collect code in 'the future’, overlooking work already happening

Post by Danny Birchall

“Everyone talks about “curating” but few sites actually do it successfully. All of our videos are curated by a person, not an algorithm (in our opinion algorithm’s suck - they don’t know what’s funny, interesting, over-looked or just plain cool). We curate everything from the clips that make up a show, to the shows themselves, to the days of the week.  We even curate special events like our Women of Punk Week, The Salute To Drugs, and The Films of Jean-Luc Godard.

"The archive itself is a living thing. Videos go up and down and that’s fine with us. We only want to show videos that people want to share. If something goes down from YouTube it goes down from Network Awesome. We only embed videos that everyone can watch in the US, UK, Germany, and France. We do not claim any proprietary rights over any curated programming.”

From ’What is Network Awesome’

• Accepts ‘curation’ as a thing that happens outside museums
• Posits that quality and success are measurable aspects of curation
• Asserts that only humans can adequately curate
• Clearly separates content from curation.