The rise of the citizen curator : participation as curation on the web

From jazz clubs to cheese plates, the term curation has become a signifier of the growing need to organise and prioritise the seemingly endless possibilities of the digital sphere. The issue addressed here is in the associated meanings of the word curation and what it means to be a curator by examining the experience of the curatorial within a discrete context: the Irish curatorial landscape. The word curation comes from the Latin curare, to care for, and has long been associated with the professional duties of those selected as custodians for objects and knowledge deemed to be important to communities, nations, countries or even the world. However, as objects move from being purely physical to the digital, and knowledge changes from being transmitted through similarly physical media to digital formats that can be set free on the Web, what it means to curate has also changed. Curators are no longer necessarily identified as employed within museums or galleries; the word is now also applied to those who engage with and aid in the management and presentation of digital assets online. Curators have emerged in the online space much like their forerunners, bloggers or citizen journalists. We are now seeing the rise of citizen curators on the Web, which has not created these individually motivated curators, but has made their curatorial activities visible. Citizen journalists no longer need to have a printing press or publishing house to communicate with their audience; similarly, citizen curators do not need a private cabinet of curiosities or a job in a museum to allow them to curate or exhibit to an audience.The aims of this research are threefold: to examine the current terminology related to curation by those who identify as curators or engage in curation in Ireland; to define what it means to be a curator or a citizen curator within the Irish context; and to investigate the changing nature of exhibition spaces contained in the Irish context in light of the Web and digital spaces. The study will take the form of an autoethnography, exploiting my unique position within the museum and open knowledge community in Ireland to examine current understandings of curation and the phenomenon of the citizen curator. The focus will be on my work within Wikimedia Community Ireland (WCI), a branch of the Wikimedia Foundation which promotes the use of Wikipedia in Ireland in education, culture, and open knowledge. As an autoethnographer, I can act as an intermediary, part way between those working in cultural organisations and the public involved in knowledge building projects. The study will look at how those engaged in curation articulate the work they do by means of interviews and participant observation. These sources will allow for the development of a spectrum of curatorial practice.The spectrum will arise from the participants’ (both citizen curators and those working in Irish cultural institutions) own understanding and definitions of curation and what it means to curate. In placing these definitions of curation within a spectrum that takes in broader understandings of curatorial practice, the newer forms of digital curation, and a picture of how the citizen curator relates to these methods, will emerge. The disruptive effect which the digital, and in particular the concept of the Long Tail, has brought to bear upon understanding of the assembling, storing, and using of collections will be examined. It will answer many of the issues surrounding the discipline-specific definitions of curation and the curator while informing their relationship with each other. By drawing out curation into a spectrum, what unfolds is the movement of curation from a traditional and closed system of learnt practices, to one which is formed around more open and accessible conventions of curation. In identifying the citizen curator, their role in the larger curatorial debate can be acknowledged and better incorporated into the multitude of online curated projects. This hinges on the emergence of the Do It With Others ethos which pervades both online and offline creative communities, and it redefines curation from a solitary practice, to one which is demarcated by its participatory nature

Intersections of open educational resources and Information literacy

Comprend des références bibliographiques et un indexALA Editions"Information literacy skills are key when finding, using, adapting, and producing open educational resources (OER). Educators who wish to include OER for their students need to be able to find these resources and use them according to their permissions. When open pedagogical methods are employed, students need to be able to use information literacy skills as they compile, reuse, and create open resources. Intersections of Open Educational Resources and Information Literacy captures current open education and information literacy theory and practice and provides inspiration for the future. Chapters include practical applications, theoretical musings, literature reviews, and case studies and discuss social justice issues, collaboration, open pedagogy, training, and advocacy.Chapters cover topics including library-led OER creation; digital cultural heritage and the intersections of primary source literacy and information literacy; situated learning and open pedagogy; critical librarianship and open education; and developing student OER leaders."--provided by ALAstor

Remixing Museology: An approach to collecting social media in museums

At its core, this is a thesis about collecting social media in museums. As part of it I have drawn on theories of remix (Lessig, 2008, Navas et al., 2015) and appropriate museology (Kreps, 2008, 2015) to argue that in order for museums to be able to collect social media, they need to remix collections management processes to make them more appropriate for new and emerging object types. My research was driven by my own love of getting involved and has led to what I can only describe as a mixed-methodology approach. Taking an overarchingly autoethnographic approach, I’ve utilised reflexive dyadic interviews, action research and self-reflection. The thesis is structured around past attempts at collecting social media at the Museum of London and Victoria and Albert Museum, my participation in the Collecting Social Photo project, and practicing what I preach at the National Science and Media Museum where I worked collaboratively to collect an ‘absolute unit’ of a social media object. Throughout, I have been guided by the concept of ‘Remix Museology’ which has emerged as a way to make ongoing pragmatic and incremental remixes to collecting practices to support the culturally and ethically appropriate acquisition of new and emerging objects. Whilst this thesis is primarily interested in Remix Museology as a method to support collecting social media, you may have noticed that I am also using alternative forms of academic writing. I write in a way that reflects the objects I am advocating museums collect, my methodological choices and my approach to change which makes careful use of humour. As a result, this thesis also works to remix academic form; taking a hop, skip and a jump towards online cultures, harnessing the critical power of memes, emojis and humour in a way that is appropriate to both the topic and method at hand

Implementing the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) for accessibility and reuse of cultural heritage resources on the web – Challenges and Advantages

The accessibility of images-based resources is important for the practice of research, teaching and knowledge transfer in the Social Sciences and the Humanities. In the past twenty-five years, Cultural Heritage Institutions (CHIs) have been digitizing and providing millions of digital surrogates of their artefacts, paintings, books, maps, manuscripts and other objects in digital repositories and web platforms. However, most of those digital resources are still locked up in silos which means they lack interoperability and reusability. To address this issue, the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) was created in 2011 by technologists from Stanford University, The British Library and The Bodleian Library, The National Library of Norway and The National Library of France (BnF). This study will address the challenges and advantages of the IIIF’s implementation in digital repositories of CHIs and how the IIIF can enhance research, teaching and knowledge transfer in the social sciences and humanities. This study will also look at the IIIF implementation scenario in Europe and in Portugal through qualitative analysis of professionals’ responses to a questionnaire.A acessibilidade de recursos baseados em imagens é importante para a prática da investigação, ensino e transferência de conhecimentos nas Ciências Sociais e Humanas. Nos últimos vinte e cinco anos, as Instituições de Património Cultural (CHIs) têm vindo a digitalizar e a fornecer milhões de substitutos digitais dos seus artefactos, pinturas, livros, mapas, manuscritos e outros objetos em repositórios digitais e plataformas web. No entanto, a maioria desses recursos digitais ainda se encontram encerrados em silos, o que significa que lhes falta interoperabilidade e reutilização. Para abordar esta questão, o International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) foi criado em 2011 por tecnólogos da Universidade de Stanford, The British Library e The Bodleian Library, The National Library of Norway e The National Library of France (BnF). Este estudo abordará os desafios e vantagens da implementação do IIIF em repositórios digitais de instituições culturais e universidades e como o IIIF pode melhorar a investigação, o ensino e a transferência de conhecimento nas ciências sociais e humanas. Este estudo analisará também o cenário de implementação da IIIF em Portugal através da análise qualitativa das respostas dos profissionais a um questionário

Visual Analytics for the Exploratory Analysis and Labeling of Cultural Data

Cultural data can come in various forms and modalities, such as text traditions, artworks, music, crafted objects, or even as intangible heritage such as biographies of people, performing arts, cultural customs and rites. The assignment of metadata to such cultural heritage objects is an important task that people working in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) do on a daily basis. These rich metadata collections are used to categorize, structure, and study collections, but can also be used to apply computational methods. Such computational methods are in the focus of Computational and Digital Humanities projects and research. For the longest time, the digital humanities community has focused on textual corpora, including text mining, and other natural language processing techniques. Although some disciplines of the humanities, such as art history and archaeology have a long history of using visualizations. In recent years, the digital humanities community has started to shift the focus to include other modalities, such as audio-visual data. In turn, methods in machine learning and computer vision have been proposed for the specificities of such corpora. Over the last decade, the visualization community has engaged in several collaborations with the digital humanities, often with a focus on exploratory or comparative analysis of the data at hand. This includes both methods and systems that support classical Close Reading of the material and Distant Reading methods that give an overview of larger collections, as well as methods in between, such as Meso Reading. Furthermore, a wider application of machine learning methods can be observed on cultural heritage collections. But they are rarely applied together with visualizations to allow for further perspectives on the collections in a visual analytics or human-in-the-loop setting. Visual analytics can help in the decision-making process by guiding domain experts through the collection of interest. However, state-of-the-art supervised machine learning methods are often not applicable to the collection of interest due to missing ground truth. One form of ground truth are class labels, e.g., of entities depicted in an image collection, assigned to the individual images. Labeling all objects in a collection is an arduous task when performed manually, because cultural heritage collections contain a wide variety of different objects with plenty of details. A problem that arises with these collections curated in different institutions is that not always a specific standard is followed, so the vocabulary used can drift apart from another, making it difficult to combine the data from these institutions for large-scale analysis. This thesis presents a series of projects that combine machine learning methods with interactive visualizations for the exploratory analysis and labeling of cultural data. First, we define cultural data with regard to heritage and contemporary data, then we look at the state-of-the-art of existing visualization, computer vision, and visual analytics methods and projects focusing on cultural data collections. After this, we present the problems addressed in this thesis and their solutions, starting with a series of visualizations to explore different facets of rap lyrics and rap artists with a focus on text reuse. Next, we engage in a more complex case of text reuse, the collation of medieval vernacular text editions. For this, a human-in-the-loop process is presented that applies word embeddings and interactive visualizations to perform textual alignments on under-resourced languages supported by labeling of the relations between lines and the relations between words. We then switch the focus from textual data to another modality of cultural data by presenting a Virtual Museum that combines interactive visualizations and computer vision in order to explore a collection of artworks. With the lessons learned from the previous projects, we engage in the labeling and analysis of medieval illuminated manuscripts and so combine some of the machine learning methods and visualizations that were used for textual data with computer vision methods. Finally, we give reflections on the interdisciplinary projects and the lessons learned, before we discuss existing challenges when working with cultural heritage data from the computer science perspective to outline potential research directions for machine learning and visual analytics of cultural heritage data

“I Am Alive in Here”: Liveness, Mediation and the Staged Real of David Blaine’s Body

This article explores how mediation has impacted the meanings of David Blaine’s endurance feats Above the Below (2003) and Dive of Death (2008), using both traces of the live events found through academic and journalistic commentary, and the films made that document these performances. Using this evidence, both performances suffered from an ambivalent reception that suggested they failed to entertain on the level of high or popular culture. Mediatization plays a recuperative role in understanding Blaine’s body as a container of his power and as invulnerable, retroactively interpreting the live events so that he emerges from his ordeals triumphantly as a coherent, heroic subject. Above the Below engaged a discourse of individual transcendence that valorized the extraordinary power of Blaine’s body, while the recording of Dive of Death attempted a recovery of a stunt that was largely considered to have failed. Both these works therefore engage the potential of mediation to retrospectively interpret performance, offering a ‘version’ of the performance that can be consumed and circulated on its own terms