1. Give users what they need Build a cohesive experience Stay in budget Minimize revisions Deliver on time Please our clients (and ourselves) Rally everyone around a vision
2. “All history is provisional, and any retrospective worth looking at expresses a point of view.” Peter Galassi, Chief Curator, MOMA Department of Photography Trustworthy arbiter of reality?
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4. “Next we put together the catalog, a book of the exhibition—not an entry for each piece. A narrative allows us to tell the story better and more concisely than if we had to comment on each object.”
If you want to be a better curator, it’s worth looking at the processes and lessons traditional museum curators and exhibit designers bring to curation. The first is perspective. We’ll discuss how and why you should bring your brand’s point of view into the content you curate—and why, without that, you might as well just link to the original material and leave it at that.
We’ll also discuss the role, and opportunity, for automated curation tools in your process. But don’t expect a product pitch. There are some useful tools, but when it comes to cultivation, aggregation, and editing, they won’t replace your role as a human curator just yet.
We’ll also dig in to how you can bring storytelling and narrative to the process so that you can use content to tell your brand’s story better and more concisely every time.
Then, drawing equally on Degas and the world of dogs, we’ll discuss specific techniques you can use in juxtaposition, hierarchy, organization, and more to better tell that story. How do you want to introduce website visitors to your brand—and how much can you control their user experience? More than you think.“There’s a whole organizational principle that gets shaped by the person determining the sequence—and you can compare Chihuahua and Great Danes if you want, but it doesn’t serve either well…but scale is appreciated best when you think—we have a large Degas oil that will be in a room with smaller Degas pastels and monotypes, and many of these were entirely intended for private ownership. In some cases, because of their risqué subject matter, they were intended for private viewing, not for hanging on the wall. So what you’re doing is comparing a big canvas with its public purpose with small pieces
Finally, we’ll look at a variety of current examples of effective—and woefully ineffective—curation on the web to discuss the ethical implications. What are your responsibilities as a curator? Walk away with the business case, tools and techniques, and inspiration to bring this into your work in a sustainable and exciting way.What are the ethical implications of curation—when you take things out of context, change original quotes or images, is this okay? What if there were a way to change original content so as to make it a more accurate representation of reality?
