Digital Curation

= the process of establishing and developing long term repositories of digital assets for current and future reference by researchers, scientists, and historians, and scholars generally.

Description

"The advent of affordable global digital connectivity of unprecedented scale and scope has created opportunities not only for more effective and efficient research, but also for new, better, faster and previously impossible research. Curation and management, of research results, are seen as the active management and appraisal of digital content during the entire life-cycle of scholarly and scientific interest; and are paramount to reproducibility and re-use for periods longer than 20 years." (http://blogs.uct.ac.za/blog/openingscholarship/2007/10/12/the-1st-african-digital-curation-conference)

Characteristics

JP Rangaswami:

"Digital curation seems to be a richer form of curation than its analog equivalent. Here’s what I think it consists of:

Authenticity Veracity Access Relevance Consume-ability Produce-ability

Let me try and explain a little further.

• Authenticity: Confirming the provenance of the item, that it was created by the person or persons claimed. That the person credited wrote the book or article. That the singer or band sang the song. That the actor or director made the movie. And so on and so forth. Traditional media sources were quite used to doing this, and should be able to continue to do this.

• Veracity: Confirming the “truth” of the item, in the sense of the “facts” represented. That the news item has been verified. That the photograph hasn’t been doctored. That the voice hasn’t been dubbed. You know what I mean. Again, something that traditional media are quite used to doing, something they should continue to do.

• Access: Andrew Savikas, in an article in O’Reilly TOC some time ago, mooted the idea of Content As A Service. My takeaway from it was simple. People do not pay for the “content” of a song or clip on iTunes as much as they pay for the convenience of getting to the item quickly and with a minimum of fuss. One could argue that traditional media had a role to make it simple and convenient for us to consume analog content, and that they will be able to adjust to the new world accordingly.

• Relevance: Now it gets a little more interesting, touching on interests and aspirations, on preferences and profiling. Something that the analog world was poor at, something that traditional media didn’t really take up in the digital world. Can be done in many ways, some involving technology, some involving humans. And some involving both. Ad-based relevance is becoming harder and harder to sustain; curation via social networks seems to work, and to work well.

• Consume-ability: This covers a whole shopping-trolley of concepts right now, and I’m going to have to work on it. I use it to mean device-agnostic availability of the digital content, so that I don’t have to use an iPod to listen to music from iTunes. I use it to mean ease of comprehension, whether through the use of visualisation tools like heatmaps or wordles or tag clouds or charts or whatever. I use it to mean tools to simplify (and sometimes even enrich) the content, via translation, via summarising, via hyperlinks, via mashups (especially those that add location or time contexts). I use it to mean the use of tools like Layar and Retroscope. [Incidentally, I plug these technologies completely unashamedly. Both Maarten and Chris are friends, but that's not why I blog about them. I blog about them because they're brilliant!]

• Produce-ability: We’ve only just begun to appreciate a return to the Maker culture, something that people like Tim O’Reilly, Dale Dougherty, Cory Doctorow, Larry Lessig et al have been yelling about for some time now. The industrial-revolution-meets-central-broadcast woolly mammoth of the last 150 years seems incapable of recognising the significance of the small mammals currently underfoot. So that model is destined to go the way of all mammoths. Soon we will look at things in terms of how easy they are to get under the hood of, how easy they are to adapt, mutate, mangle, make something completely new out of. Which is why the rules of engagement will change. Intellectual property rights will be recast. Yes, will. There is no longer a choice, just the illusion of time. It is over. Period.

Production, consumption and distribution of information have already been democratised. There’s no turning back. Curation will go that way. Which means that the very concept of the expert, the professional, the editor, the moderator of all that is great and good, changes." (http://confusedofcalcutta.com/2010/06/06/thinking-about-democratised-curation/)

Discussion

Digital curation vs. knowledge depository, at http://oklahomalawlibrarianblawg.wordpress.com/2008/09/07/digital-curation-vs-knowledge-repository/

Crowdsourced Curation via Reputation Systems and the Social Graph

Eric Reasons:

"It is at this point that many people interject: "This is the problem with the internet! It's full of crap!" Many would argue that without professional producers, editors, publishers, and the natural scarcity that we became accustomed to, there's a flood of low-quality material that we can't possible sift through on our own. From blogs to music to software to journalism, one of the biggest fears of the established order is how to handle the oncoming glut of mediocrity. Who shall tell us The Good from The Bad? "We need gatekeepers, and they need to be paid!"

All of this is true, to an extent. We do need ways to filter and discover content. And just because we can produce something and transmit it, doesn't mean that it's worth consuming. Luckily, the Internet not only gave us the means to produce and transmit on our own, but to curate as well. We do it every time we e-mail, share, "like", tweet, or buzz a link. For example...

How did you find this article that you're reading right now? I'm pretty sure it hasn't been published in the New York Times. No professional editor or publisher made a determination for you as to this article's quality, aside from the author himself. Did a friend send you a link? Did you see it posted to Facebook, Twitter, Buzz? The Internet has enabled us to build our social graph, and in turn, that social graph acts as an aggregate gatekeeper. The better that these systems for crowdsourcing the curation of content become, the more accurate the results will be.

This social-graph-as-curation is still relatively new, even by Internet standards. However, with tools like Buzz and Digg 4 (which allows you to see the aggregate ratings for content based on your social graph, and not the whole wide world) this technique is catching up to human publishers fast. For those areas where we don't have strong social ties, we can count on reputation systems to help us "rate the raters". These systems allow strangers to rate each other's content, giving users some idea of who to trust, without having to know them personally. Yelp has a fairly mature reputation system, where locations are rated by users, but the users are rated, in turn, by each other.

Reputation systems and the social graph allow us to crowdsource curation. I'm not ready to argue that these systems are up to replacing individual human curation (yet), but they're getting better every day, and I think they are well on their way." (http://blog.ericreasons.com/2010/07/crowdsourcing-curation-social-graph-as.html)

The rest of the article compares the iPhone's and Android's curation methods for application, with the above distinctions in mind.

More Information

1. http://del.icio.us/mbauwens/Digital-Curation