Pinterest is a social networking site that I was reluctant to try when it exploded around 2012. I was wary of the many articles written about copyright infringement and it made me too nervous to try playing around with it. I also never had a hobbie of scrapbooking, making crafts, and I’m definitely not a baker. So why should I use Pinterest?
It became a network that I saw bloggers using to drive traffic to their websites and also as visual “story boards” with images of characters, settings, ect. for their stories. Being a frequent traveller at the time, I started to create boards of places I wanted to visit. It was like visual trip planning. Now I’m using Pinterest more like a bookmarking site where I can collect infographics and other visual information from websites so that I can easily find them again.
I enjoyed the “Curate” article. The Internet has democratized many things such as writing, publishing, photography, and art curation. It’s true that many people are calling themselves “Social Media Experts” and “Content Curators”, and perhaps it comes down someone’s level of digital literacy to understand that the Internet has produced mass amateurization. While there are benefits of new media such as crowd sourcing projects, there are cases such as employers who might get burned if they can’t distinguish the amateurs from the experienced.
Nicole, you are so right to bring up the idea of copyright. It's definitely something we should all heed. I also encourage the use of creative commons data: images, videos, texts etc.
Pinterest is new for me and as with other social media tools I have been learning it by experiencing it. However, this week’s readings made me realize that I haven’t even touched the surface of what Pinterest is about.
To think of Pinterest as a content curating tool as proposed by the readings is a little challenging for me. This is partly due to my arts background, where “curating” and “curator” are major words. I couldn’t help but to feel a little empathy for the Aboriginal Curator in Residence in this week’s readings when he/she says “Curating, by its very definition, is done carefully. Care is implied. Making a list it not curating."
But on the other hand, this same comment reminded me of Clay Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everybody” where he talks about how the Internet, new media and social media have removed the gate keepers of traditional media and now everybody can be a journalist or photographer and go online and publish their work. Maybe the same is happening to sacred activities such as curating. It doesn’t mean that everybody is actually doing it well, it’s just that they can now try it and experience what it is to write about what they care about, photograph and share what they like, and when it comes to curating they can use their own criteria to sort around the images or data they like.
Rosenbaum’s article talks about the importance of having some particularly devoted people (content curators) help others poor souls like mine make sense of the massive amount of data available online. He compares the role of online content curators to those of super humans who accept the very challenging task to sort and find useful information among all the noise. I was happily surprised to realize that I actually follow and benefit from some of the work of content curators, such as Brain Pickings blog which is full of interesting and useful information.
Pinterest reminds me of my teenage years when I would clip images I liked from magazines and then glue them to my notebook. I am willing to overcome that first impression and give the tool a good chance. However in my case, I will still refrain from calling “curating” what I know to be pinning.
Hi Andrea - I was thinking of Shirky too when reading both Rosenbaum's article and the Curator's blog post. With new media what exactly defines an expert?...or maybe curator isn't the right word - maybe archivist or something similar is more in line with what content curators are really doing (maybe archivist would be insulted by this?)
Oh yes, I too am wary of the term given it's academic association to museum/library etc studies. I do wonder though what happens if we think about curate and it's etymology. It's from the Latin cura - to care. It also has links to religious servitude:
"In the Catholic Church, the English word "curate" is used for a priest assigned to a parish in a position subordinate to that of the parish priest. The parish priest (or in the United States the "pastor") is the priest who has canonical responsibility for the parish. He may be assisted by one or more other priests, referred to as curates, assistant priests,[2] parochial vicars[3] or (in America) "associate/assistant pastors". In other languages, derivations from curatus may be used differently. In French, the curé is the chief priest of a parish,[4] as do the Italian curato, the Spanish cura and in Filipino, where kura paroko is derived from the Spanish term."
Can we say that we pin with care? Perhaps that's an underlying theme of transliteracy - that we use each platform with appropriate care? We are pinning with a strategy in mind so that we, as Shirky says, are the journalists. People who do so without care or mind, well then, their content reflects that.
I will start by admitting I am a huge Pinterest fan! I recently saw a pin that said “The cure for boredom is Pinterest. There is no cure for Pinterest...”. How true! Its clean design and relevant content, which is specifically curated for each user, proves to be powerful and addictive. According to Media Bistro in February 2012, Pinterest users spend an average of 1 hour and 17 minutes on the site each month, which is longer than the average time spent on Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+... combined!
The best part about using Pinterest is that you don’t have to create any of your own content to successfully use the Pinterest platform, either as an individual or as a business. Your posts can be a combination of images you’ve curated, co-created, original works, consumer generated and/or sponsored.
I agree with Jessica when she states in her PowerPoint presentation that the emerging role as an online editor is becoming an ever more valued and important skill. There is so much content online, that curating that content and narrowing down what’s out there is a difficult task. I also found the information in Jessica’s presentation about the shelf life a pin on Pinterest fascinating. Unlike a tweet or a Facebook post (each of which have a shelf life of 5-25 minutes and 80 minutes, respectively), a pin has a shelf life of one week. People use Pinterest to collect and share interesting visual content that they save for later. This means that visual information on Pinterest will be seen by many users and a variety of users over a long period of time, helping to ensure wide reach.
The most interesting aspect of the Pinterest platform from an organizational standpoint is that Pinterest users buy! According to PriceGrabber, 21% of Pinterest users bought something they saw on a pinboard, so people aren’t just looking at pretty pictures on Pinterest… they’re buying what they see too! Driving web traffic from Pinterest to a company’s website, and therefore to their product and service offerings, is something Pinterest does very well. Above and beyond the fact that Pinterest can drive traffic to a company’s website, Beth Hayden, the author of Pinfluence, suggests that Pinterest also works well to “humanize your brand.” Virtual pinboards provide current and future customers a look inside what a brand stands for. It allows users to see the company’s brand personality and determine whether or not they are aligned with the organization, which can help to establish authentic supporters and brand evangelists.
Hi Diana, Good post. Constant Contact sells email marketing services to businesses. Definitely an intangible product. They have a very successful Pinterest strategy - link below - it includes humanizing their brand as you mention. http://www.pinterest.com/search/boards/?q=constant%20contact
I'm glad you found my presentation useful. :) The statistics are staggering especially considering how young Pinterest is. You might also be interested in this slideshare presentation which maps out what successful brands/organisations have done with Pinterest. I especially like the first example, how Elle creates new boards during live events. It's like live-tweeting on a visual level. Great idea especially for something as visual as fashion/design.
I thought Steven Rosenbaum’s article on Content Curating was interesting. We’ve been hearing a lot about curating your own content on the Web through social media sites like Pinterest, and Rosenbaum brought up some good points about the incredible amount of content available on the Web these days, and how we should go about harnessing the information. He states that we need experts in specific content areas to help curate the information for us – to help wade through all of the extraneous information. Rosenbaum states that “So anyone who steps up and volunteers to curate in their area of knowledge and passion is taking on a Herculean task. They're going to stand between the web and their readers, using all of the tools at their disposal to "listen" to the web, and then pull out of the data stream nuggets of wisdom, breaking news, important new voices, and other salient details.” This seems to be a good thing if you can find a trusted content curator that you can follow on Pinterest or blog sites etc. I have personally found it interesting the number of librarian boards and teacher specific boards there are on Pinterest – this is something I just discovered this year – people/experts in a field using Pinterest to share information with others in their field. Obviously this could be used for all fields (and probably is..). I do understand the frustration of the author of “Open letter to everyone using the word ‘Curate’ incorrectly on the Internet” about the use of the word ‘curate’ being used so freely by Pinterest or others collecting and sorting information on the Internet. I think the word “content” in front of ‘curate’ helps differentiate the action. The thing about the author’s argument is that he’s an expert in his field (and a professional curator), but he’s not taking into account that there are other experts (what constitutes an expert…that’s the question) out there that could potentially curate content from their area of knowledge/expertise – and that in certain circumstances people would want to have someone sift through information for them to bring the most relevant content directly to them.
yes yes yes! exactly! there are all kinds of experts! And even the question of what constitutes an expert is important to raise. A couple of things that might affect our interpretation of this article. 1) note that the original url is no longer available. We need to access this information via other parties (those content curators). 2) the letter was originally written in 2011. A lot has changed since then. We, as users, are much more transliterate, so perhaps that gives us more curatorial cred too? 3) that perennial question of relevancy. To be relevant shouldn't we embrace the change in language? If curate has taken on a new meaning (as it has in the history of the word), should *original* curators accept a wider engagement rather than trying to take ownership of the term?
I became aware of Pinterest a couple of years ago but to be honest I never gave it much attention. I saw it as a social site mostly geared towards women as it was only my female friends that had talked about using it for fashion, scrapbooking, jewelry, and home décor ideas. Having to create my own page as part of this course, I’ve come to the realization that Pinterest can in fact be used by everyone. It truly does offer a place to create, curate, publish, and share content. I think the thing I like the most about it is the fact that it helps to organize all the little tidbits of information that we become exposed to in a day, week, month or year. As Steven Rosenbaum mentioned, “the amount of data coming at us in increasingly mind-boggling” and so having a platform that can help archive and filter that data (information/content) is extremely beneficial. It keeps the information and content alive for people to experience time and time again. Considering Pinterest’s popularity is continuing to rise, I have been thinking about how I could use it for work purposes. I stumbled upon the University of Washington Huskies site (http://www.pinterest.com/UWAthletics/) and thought it was an excellent example of how a sport organization could use this type of platform to categorize, archive, and share content that people can relate to…and in some ways form a community around. I think I may have to follow their lead and develop a board similar to theirs so as start engaging people in this type of fashion.
Jonathan, I read your comment and then I reread it. I'm stuck on your second sentence, that you saw Pinterest as mostly geared towards women. Now, current statistics show that more women than men use Pinterest but does that mean it is "geared" to us? Hrm. It got me thinking about how women and men may use Pinterest differently. I did some reading and what I found was unsettling. Do some googling and you will see too. It seems that discussions of Pinterest can really bring out sexist stereotypes. Users note that "women window shop and men buy so men won't use Pinterest." Though we, in our class, may not easily accept such banalities, 487 people "liked" that comment. That is 487 people, out there, online, who think this is a valid statement. And, because of this perceived femininity, these same commenters, deem visual bookmarking to be relegated to women's domain. I disagree. Of course you do too. Visual bookmarking has a variety of uses and certainly not just for wedding bouquets (NB I did NO scrapbooking for my wedding - I offer myself as an example of a woman who does not ascribe to these silly stereotypes). What's interesting is the variety of male-centred Pinterest boards. What do you think of these Jonathan: Gentlemint, Dudepins and Manteresting.
Thanks for sharing the great example of the Washington Huskies board.
Interesting… I wasn't looking at it quite like that but you raise some valid points that I clearly didn't consider. I did some googling as you suggested and I was amazed to see the sexist stereotypes that were generated through various posts. I think some of this profiling can be contributed to a lack of knowledge and awareness of what Pinterest truly is and what it can offer, such as its unique ability to share information in a variety of ways making it useful for everyone. At the end of the day, Pinterest is a tool like any other social network and how people choose to use that tool is up to them.
I found the open letter from the Hermitage Museum Curator fascinating. Here’s his definition of curate: To curate doesn’t just mean to carefully select items, but also to look after and care for them. One who curates an exhibition is responsible for the preservation of the objects used while they are on exhibition and after.
The Oxford Dictionary has the same definition: To select, organize, and look after the items in (a collection or exhibition): both exhibitions are curated by the Centre’s director http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/curate?q=curate#curate-2
Steven Rosenbaum’s definition: Curation is the act of individuals with a passion for a content area to find, contextualize, and organize information. He references this in context of organizing the massive tide of real time data being generated on the internet.
I found this Tech Target definition: Content curation is the gathering, organizing and online presentation of content related to a particular theme or topic. As a rule, a content curation site reproduces some of the original content and links to the full entry. Some content curation sites also provide original content, interpretation and commentary. http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/content-curation
The Museum Curator’s frustration is understandable given the years of training he has devoted to his profession. In his context he’s referencing tangible historical items that need special care to prevent deterioration of their physical properties. Pinterest and Etsy are digital properties referencing digital items being organized in the online data deluge. This is about intangible content needing organization. Those doing the organization, the content curation, have minor or no barriers to entry in terms of education: they can just start a digital curation. New media terminology wins out in a new media world.
Lynne, thanks for sharing some definitions. I think it helps too if we look at the etymology. Like I said up here. I wonder though about your final sentence. New media terminology wins out...it sounds a bit like the Borg: "resistance is futile." I wonder if it's about transliteracy, moving our literacies out of their *original* contexts and broadening or enlarging them in different (and perhaps newer) scenarios?
Mandeep you have hit the nail on the head with your comment about social media overload. It's true - we can all feel overwhelmed by the plethora of platforms and consequently, data, that is available. A key aspect though is to only use the platforms that you find appropriate to your studies/networking/audience etc. If your readers are not on Pinterest, then definitely don't use it. I do think that it is a great visual tool and a nice way to organise information. See our class board: http://www.pinterest.com/drjessl/new-media-narratives-masters-course-at-ualberta/.
I also think you're accurate when you note how Pinterest adds to your own digital narrative. EXACTLY! That's why in this course we are touching on a variety of platforms. We don't have to use every one, but those we do (and if we do it well), add to our own narrative (personal or business). How we use these platforms too speaks volumes about our evolving transliteracy skills.
Pinterest is a social networking site that I was reluctant to try when it exploded around 2012. I was wary of the many articles written about copyright infringement and it made me too nervous to try playing around with it. I also never had a hobbie of scrapbooking, making crafts, and I’m definitely not a baker. So why should I use Pinterest?
ReplyDeleteIt became a network that I saw bloggers using to drive traffic to their websites and also as visual “story boards” with images of characters, settings, ect. for their stories. Being a frequent traveller at the time, I started to create boards of places I wanted to visit. It was like visual trip planning. Now I’m using Pinterest more like a bookmarking site where I can collect infographics and other visual information from websites so that I can easily find them again.
I enjoyed the “Curate” article. The Internet has democratized many things such as writing, publishing, photography, and art curation. It’s true that many people are calling themselves “Social Media Experts” and “Content Curators”, and perhaps it comes down someone’s level of digital literacy to understand that the Internet has produced mass amateurization. While there are benefits of new media such as crowd sourcing projects, there are cases such as employers who might get burned if they can’t distinguish the amateurs from the experienced.
Nicole, you are so right to bring up the idea of copyright. It's definitely something we should all heed. I also encourage the use of creative commons data: images, videos, texts etc.
DeletePinterest is new for me and as with other social media tools I have been learning it by experiencing it. However, this week’s readings made me realize that I haven’t even touched the surface of what Pinterest is about.
ReplyDeleteTo think of Pinterest as a content curating tool as proposed by the readings is a little challenging for me. This is partly due to my arts background, where “curating” and “curator” are major words. I couldn’t help but to feel a little empathy for the Aboriginal Curator in Residence in this week’s readings when he/she says “Curating, by its very definition, is done carefully. Care is implied. Making a list it not curating."
But on the other hand, this same comment reminded me of Clay Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everybody” where he talks about how the Internet, new media and social media have removed the gate keepers of traditional media and now everybody can be a journalist or photographer and go online and publish their work. Maybe the same is happening to sacred activities such as curating. It doesn’t mean that everybody is actually doing it well, it’s just that they can now try it and experience what it is to write about what they care about, photograph and share what they like, and when it comes to curating they can use their own criteria to sort around the images or data they like.
Rosenbaum’s article talks about the importance of having some particularly devoted people (content curators) help others poor souls like mine make sense of the massive amount of data available online. He compares the role of online content curators to those of super humans who accept the very challenging task to sort and find useful information among all the noise. I was happily surprised to realize that I actually follow and benefit from some of the work of content curators, such as Brain Pickings blog which is full of interesting and useful information.
Pinterest reminds me of my teenage years when I would clip images I liked from magazines and then glue them to my notebook. I am willing to overcome that first impression and give the tool a good chance. However in my case, I will still refrain from calling “curating” what I know to be pinning.
Hi Andrea - I was thinking of Shirky too when reading both Rosenbaum's article and the Curator's blog post. With new media what exactly defines an expert?...or maybe curator isn't the right word - maybe archivist or something similar is more in line with what content curators are really doing (maybe archivist would be insulted by this?)
DeleteOh yes, I too am wary of the term given it's academic association to museum/library etc studies. I do wonder though what happens if we think about curate and it's etymology. It's from the Latin cura - to care. It also has links to religious servitude:
Delete"In the Catholic Church, the English word "curate" is used for a priest assigned to a parish in a position subordinate to that of the parish priest. The parish priest (or in the United States the "pastor") is the priest who has canonical responsibility for the parish. He may be assisted by one or more other priests, referred to as curates, assistant priests,[2] parochial vicars[3] or (in America) "associate/assistant pastors".
In other languages, derivations from curatus may be used differently. In French, the curé is the chief priest of a parish,[4] as do the Italian curato, the Spanish cura and in Filipino, where kura paroko is derived from the Spanish term."
Can we say that we pin with care? Perhaps that's an underlying theme of transliteracy - that we use each platform with appropriate care? We are pinning with a strategy in mind so that we, as Shirky says, are the journalists. People who do so without care or mind, well then, their content reflects that.
I will start by admitting I am a huge Pinterest fan! I recently saw a pin that said “The cure for boredom is Pinterest. There is no cure for Pinterest...”. How true! Its clean design and relevant content, which is specifically curated for each user, proves to be powerful and addictive. According to Media Bistro in February 2012, Pinterest users spend an average of 1 hour and 17 minutes on the site each month, which is longer than the average time spent on Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+... combined!
ReplyDeleteThe best part about using Pinterest is that you don’t have to create any of your own content to successfully use the Pinterest platform, either as an individual or as a business. Your posts can be a combination of images you’ve curated, co-created, original works, consumer generated and/or sponsored.
I agree with Jessica when she states in her PowerPoint presentation that the emerging role as an online editor is becoming an ever more valued and important skill. There is so much content online, that curating that content and narrowing down what’s out there is a difficult task. I also found the information in Jessica’s presentation about the shelf life a pin on Pinterest fascinating. Unlike a tweet or a Facebook post (each of which have a shelf life of 5-25 minutes and 80 minutes, respectively), a pin has a shelf life of one week. People use Pinterest to collect and share interesting visual content that they save for later. This means that visual information on Pinterest will be seen by many users and a variety of users over a long period of time, helping to ensure wide reach.
The most interesting aspect of the Pinterest platform from an organizational standpoint is that Pinterest users buy! According to PriceGrabber, 21% of Pinterest users bought something they saw on a pinboard, so people aren’t just looking at pretty pictures on Pinterest… they’re buying what they see too! Driving web traffic from Pinterest to a company’s website, and therefore to their product and service offerings, is something Pinterest does very well.
Above and beyond the fact that Pinterest can drive traffic to a company’s website, Beth Hayden, the author of Pinfluence, suggests that Pinterest also works well to “humanize your brand.” Virtual pinboards provide current and future customers a look inside what a brand stands for. It allows users to see the company’s brand personality and determine whether or not they are aligned with the organization, which can help to establish authentic supporters and brand evangelists.
Pinterest rocks!
I like your post Diana, you almost convince me that Pinterest rocks :)
DeleteHi Diana,
DeleteGood post. Constant Contact sells email marketing services to businesses. Definitely an intangible product.
They have a very successful Pinterest strategy - link below - it includes humanizing their brand as you mention.
http://www.pinterest.com/search/boards/?q=constant%20contact
I'm glad you found my presentation useful. :) The statistics are staggering especially considering how young Pinterest is. You might also be interested in this slideshare presentation which maps out what successful brands/organisations have done with Pinterest. I especially like the first example, how Elle creates new boards during live events. It's like live-tweeting on a visual level. Great idea especially for something as visual as fashion/design.
DeleteI thought Steven Rosenbaum’s article on Content Curating was interesting. We’ve been hearing a lot about curating your own content on the Web through social media sites like Pinterest, and Rosenbaum brought up some good points about the incredible amount of content available on the Web these days, and how we should go about harnessing the information. He states that we need experts in specific content areas to help curate the information for us – to help wade through all of the extraneous information. Rosenbaum states that “So anyone who steps up and volunteers to curate in their area of knowledge and passion is taking on a Herculean task. They're going to stand between the web and their readers, using all of the tools at their disposal to "listen" to the web, and then pull out of the data stream nuggets of wisdom, breaking news, important new voices, and other salient details.” This seems to be a good thing if you can find a trusted content curator that you can follow on Pinterest or blog sites etc.
ReplyDeleteI have personally found it interesting the number of librarian boards and teacher specific boards there are on Pinterest – this is something I just discovered this year – people/experts in a field using Pinterest to share information with others in their field. Obviously this could be used for all fields (and probably is..).
I do understand the frustration of the author of “Open letter to everyone using the word ‘Curate’ incorrectly on the Internet” about the use of the word ‘curate’ being used so freely by Pinterest or others collecting and sorting information on the Internet. I think the word “content” in front of ‘curate’ helps differentiate the action. The thing about the author’s argument is that he’s an expert in his field (and a professional curator), but he’s not taking into account that there are other experts (what constitutes an expert…that’s the question) out there that could potentially curate content from their area of knowledge/expertise – and that in certain circumstances people would want to have someone sift through information for them to bring the most relevant content directly to them.
yes yes yes! exactly! there are all kinds of experts! And even the question of what constitutes an expert is important to raise. A couple of things that might affect our interpretation of this article. 1) note that the original url is no longer available. We need to access this information via other parties (those content curators). 2) the letter was originally written in 2011. A lot has changed since then. We, as users, are much more transliterate, so perhaps that gives us more curatorial cred too? 3) that perennial question of relevancy. To be relevant shouldn't we embrace the change in language? If curate has taken on a new meaning (as it has in the history of the word), should *original* curators accept a wider engagement rather than trying to take ownership of the term?
DeleteI became aware of Pinterest a couple of years ago but to be honest I never gave it much attention. I saw it as a social site mostly geared towards women as it was only my female friends that had talked about using it for fashion, scrapbooking, jewelry, and home décor ideas.
ReplyDeleteHaving to create my own page as part of this course, I’ve come to the realization that Pinterest can in fact be used by everyone. It truly does offer a place to create, curate, publish, and share content. I think the thing I like the most about it is the fact that it helps to organize all the little tidbits of information that we become exposed to in a day, week, month or year. As Steven Rosenbaum mentioned, “the amount of data coming at us in increasingly mind-boggling” and so having a platform that can help archive and filter that data (information/content) is extremely beneficial. It keeps the information and content alive for people to experience time and time again.
Considering Pinterest’s popularity is continuing to rise, I have been thinking about how I could use it for work purposes. I stumbled upon the University of Washington Huskies site (http://www.pinterest.com/UWAthletics/) and thought it was an excellent example of how a sport organization could use this type of platform to categorize, archive, and share content that people can relate to…and in some ways form a community around. I think I may have to follow their lead and develop a board similar to theirs so as start engaging people in this type of fashion.
Jonathan, I read your comment and then I reread it. I'm stuck on your second sentence, that you saw Pinterest as mostly geared towards women. Now, current statistics show that more women than men use Pinterest but does that mean it is "geared" to us? Hrm. It got me thinking about how women and men may use Pinterest differently. I did some reading and what I found was unsettling. Do some googling and you will see too. It seems that discussions of Pinterest can really bring out sexist stereotypes. Users note that "women window shop and men buy so men won't use Pinterest." Though we, in our class, may not easily accept such banalities, 487 people "liked" that comment. That is 487 people, out there, online, who think this is a valid statement. And, because of this perceived femininity, these same commenters, deem visual bookmarking to be relegated to women's domain. I disagree. Of course you do too. Visual bookmarking has a variety of uses and certainly not just for wedding bouquets (NB I did NO scrapbooking for my wedding - I offer myself as an example of a woman who does not ascribe to these silly stereotypes). What's interesting is the variety of male-centred Pinterest boards. What do you think of these Jonathan: Gentlemint, Dudepins and Manteresting.
DeleteThanks for sharing the great example of the Washington Huskies board.
Interesting… I wasn't looking at it quite like that but you raise some valid points that I clearly didn't consider. I did some googling as you suggested and I was amazed to see the sexist stereotypes that were generated through various posts. I think some of this profiling can be contributed to a lack of knowledge and awareness of what Pinterest truly is and what it can offer, such as its unique ability to share information in a variety of ways making it useful for everyone. At the end of the day, Pinterest is a tool like any other social network and how people choose to use that tool is up to them.
DeleteI found the open letter from the Hermitage Museum Curator fascinating. Here’s his definition of curate:
ReplyDeleteTo curate doesn’t just mean to carefully select items, but also to look after and care for them. One who curates an exhibition is responsible for the preservation of the objects used while they are on exhibition and after.
The Oxford Dictionary has the same definition:
To select, organize, and look after the items in (a collection or exhibition): both exhibitions are curated by the Centre’s director http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/curate?q=curate#curate-2
Steven Rosenbaum’s definition:
Curation is the act of individuals with a passion for a content area to find, contextualize, and organize information. He references this in context of organizing the massive tide of real time data being generated on the internet.
I found this Tech Target definition:
Content curation is the gathering, organizing and online presentation of content related to a particular theme or topic. As a rule, a content curation site reproduces some of the original content and links to the full entry. Some content curation sites also provide original content, interpretation and commentary. http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/content-curation
The Museum Curator’s frustration is understandable given the years of training he has devoted to his profession. In his context he’s referencing tangible historical items that need special care to prevent deterioration of their physical properties. Pinterest and Etsy are digital properties referencing digital items being organized in the online data deluge. This is about intangible content needing organization. Those doing the organization, the content curation, have minor or no barriers to entry in terms of education: they can just start a digital curation. New media terminology wins out in a new media world.
DeleteLynne, thanks for sharing some definitions. I think it helps too if we look at the etymology. Like I said up here. I wonder though about your final sentence. New media terminology wins out...it sounds a bit like the Borg: "resistance is futile." I wonder if it's about transliteracy, moving our literacies out of their *original* contexts and broadening or enlarging them in different (and perhaps newer) scenarios?
Not that it's "bad" - it's just different. Change can be frustrating.
ReplyDeleteMandeep you have hit the nail on the head with your comment about social media overload. It's true - we can all feel overwhelmed by the plethora of platforms and consequently, data, that is available. A key aspect though is to only use the platforms that you find appropriate to your studies/networking/audience etc. If your readers are not on Pinterest, then definitely don't use it. I do think that it is a great visual tool and a nice way to organise information. See our class board: http://www.pinterest.com/drjessl/new-media-narratives-masters-course-at-ualberta/.
ReplyDeleteI also think you're accurate when you note how Pinterest adds to your own digital narrative. EXACTLY! That's why in this course we are touching on a variety of platforms. We don't have to use every one, but those we do (and if we do it well), add to our own narrative (personal or business). How we use these platforms too speaks volumes about our evolving transliteracy skills.