Publish at January 14 2014 Updated September 20 2023
A fairly recent term that probably appeared in the United States in 2009, curation in the web domain refers to the activity of selecting content and then distributing it to potential readers.
Thousands of pieces of content are produced every day, in spaces such as blogs, social networks and sharing sites, some more interesting than others.
The web and its users are faced with two challenges:
For producers of digital content, there is a need to highlight their productions, at the risk of seeing them lost in the mass.
Content curation can help meet these challenges. Jérôme Deiss, who has published a post on the principle of curation in the Veille Digitale blog, won't argue the contrary. In it, he presents the five pillars of curation.
There are five steps to curation. First, the curator defines the scope of his or her work, or the thematic field of information monitoring. Secondly, he or she decides on the means to be used to aggregate content relating to his or her thematic field. This aggregation can be manual or automatic. Some Web 2.0 services make this task much easier.
Once the content has been aggregated, it's up to the curator to sort it out. It's at this stage that they decide which content to publish and which not. In many cases, it's necessary to get rid of certain resources that are recurrent in feeds or of poor quality. It's the curator's job to decide for himself what is appropriate for his readership. Editorializing and sharing the selected resources are the last two steps in the process.
A MOOC on content curation was launched on January 8. Its title: How to be an effective digital curator. Interesting insofar as the most difficult aspect of curation is knowing how to reach readers by highlighting sources.
Clearly, some practices, even if they boast about it, are not content curation, such as bookmarking. This activity can be reduced to the first two stages of curation: defining a search perimeter and aggregating content. In other words, any curator who doesn't editorialize his content is only aggregating.
Consequently, any application that does not add value to content cannot be called a curation tool. Jérôme Deiss cites two examples in his post: Paper.li and FlipBoard, which are aggregation tools, but not curation tools. What's more, some tools do enable editorialization of resources, but are used mechanically by some of their users... Just look at Scoop It, an excellent tool by the way, and the number of tables that fill up automatically every morning with resources seen and reviewed everywhere, whose only, meagre interest lies in the keywords in their title!
What's more, as curation is an informational activity in its own right, it is subject to the same ethics that apply to anyone who manages and processes information. Among other rules or best practices for curators:
As you'd expect, at Thot Cursus we're also present on curation sites such as Scoop.it and Pinterest (which is primarily an aggregation tool, but which allows us to present well and truly editorialized resources...). Our thematic areas are as follows:
The aim is to provide our readers with a thematic entry to our resources in addition to the search engine. A significant contribution in the face of infobesity.
References
Deiss, Jérôme. "Intellectual honesty, the flagship principle of curation?" Optimiser sa veille sur Internet. Accessed January 14, 2014. http://veille-digitale.com/lhonnetete-intellectuelle-principe-phare-de-la-curation/.
Guemadji-Gbedemah, Tété Enyon. "Alternative solutions against infobesity." Thot Cursus. Accessed January 14, 2014.
http://cursus.edu/article/8095/les-solutions-alternatives-contre-infobesite/.
See also our dossier: Curateur? No. Mediator? Yes! March 2011.
http://cursus.edu/dossiers-articles/dossiers/10/curateur-non-mediateur-oui/0/
Google News API - https://brightdata.fr/products/serp-api/google-search/news
Illustration: The Scoop It space "Digital tools for everyone" managed by Thot Cursus:
http://www.scoop.it/t/des-outils-numeriques-pour-tous
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