1. Mark Tebeau, Ph.D.
Department of History
Center for Public History + Digital
Humanities
Cleveland State University
mtebeau@gmail.com
@urbanhumanist
The Challenges of Curation in
the Digital & Mobile Age
Plenary
Spark Fest The Twin Cities Digital
Humanities
May 15, 2013

2. The Tipping Point is Houston’s first and only sneaker lifestyle
store located in Downtown on the ground floor of the Historic
Humble Building. We curate an eclectic collection of
sneakers, books, art, apparel, music, and accessories that
are a reflection of the Tipping Point lifestyle.

3. • Musicians
• Gallery owners
• Shop owners
• Cultural commenters
• Artists
• Museum professionals
• Scholars
• Librarians
• Social Media being built on
the concept
Everyone now a Curator

4. A brief history of “Curation”
• The 15th century: curates cared for
souls and foundling minors
• The 19th century: scholars and curators
engaged public sphere through books,
museums, streets, & civic language
• The 20th century: social historian
expands publics and purview of
museums expanded and broadened as
did curatorial purview
• The 21st century: digital age re-imaging
public discourse
4

5. Curator & Museum

6. Curation in the Digital Age
• Curation means *all* of the following activities
–Collecting
–Preserving (technically & physically)
–Archiving
–Exhibiting
–Contextualizing
–Interpreting
• Curation not discreet
• Curation interactive
• Curation collaborative

7. • Lens through which to explore how
Americans shaped memory landscapes
• Reveals ways immigrants and their
children negotiate shifting terms of
American identity
• Digital Public History opened the
Gardens
– Engaged silences & controversy
– Helped spur new growth
– Presented new research possibilities
– Contributed to emergence of the
Center for Public History + Digital
Humanities
Case Study:
The Cleveland Cultural Gardens:
http://www.culturalgardens.or
g/

8. Gardens, Monuments, & Memory
• Gardens are more complicated than the
―invented tradition‖ of the ―democratic‖
American public park
• Urban context—landmarks, vernacular
landscape, and physical infrastructure
• International context matters
• Monumental biographies

9. • Building an archive
• Physical public art objects
• Collecting oral history
• Telling stories
• Interpreting landscape
• Contextualized history
• (www.sculptingplace.com)
What, how, & where …
… were we Curating?

10. Case Study: Curating a Street
• How do we interpret history on the street?
• Best practices in digital oral history?
• Resolving the challenge of content
management?
• Creating a research community
– Connecting undergrads to projects
– Integrating K-12 teaching communities
– Teaching & Learning Cleveland
• Funding
• Building Digital Public History laboratory.

11. Questions of Digital Curation
• Archivists & scholars curate, but differently
• Is aggregation curation?
• Can curation be social and crowdsourced?
• Collaborative
• Content Management
• Metadata
• Open data
• Performance
• Dynamic
• Interpretive

12. Mobile Transformation

13. • Neilson reports that more than half, 55%, of
mobile owners have a smartphone
• Pew‘s February 2012 study found 46% of US
adults owned a smartphone
• comScore estimate that smartphone ownership in
the US reached 110 million users by May 2012
• Pew Internet & American Life suggest the mobile
revolution has been a paradigmatic shift
– Youth adopting most rapidly
– >71% among 25-34 year-olds owned smartphones.
– Rise of ―apps culture‖
– Crosses racial & ethnic divide
– Different usage patterns by SES
Who uses Mobile?

14. Who has access to mobile?

15. How is Mobile Used?

16. Mobile overtakes Desktop

17. Mobile in Public Humanities
• Mobile is now according to Horizon Report
• 80% of people accessing internet worldwide … will do so from mobile
device
• Cultural Organizations
– 30% of history museums, >50% of art museums
– > 50% Museums with 50k – 250k visitors
• Education
– Non-existent in K-12, except via ―labs‖
– ―BYOD‖ gaining popularity (also ―BYOT‖
– Universities produce in context of courses, but appears to be
used rarely in learning context; not as imaginative as you might
think…
• Community History
– Based on cultural organization, unlikely
• Place-Based Economic Development
– Increasingly common for Heritage Tourism

18. Trends: Mobile becoming Pervasive

19. Mobile represents significant change
• Coupled with Open Data, Big Data & Cloud Computing …
… mobile has create ubiquitous digital environments
• Immediacy
• Individualized
• Information availability
• Information formatting
• Connectedness: geographic, friend, family
• Blurs boundaries between formal/informal
• Full sensing devices
• The emerging Internet of Things, which is simply ―network-
aware smart objects that connect the physical world with the
world of digital information and communication.‖

20. Case Study: Curating the City?
• Why curate a garden or a street, when you can curate a
city?
• What were key curatorial lessons from the Gardens &
Kiosk projects?
• What were the key technological trends?
• Finally, can we make our project extensible to other
places?

21. Remaking Place?
• Place as metaphor
– Musil: "Nothing as Invisible as a Statue"
– Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities
• What is place?
– Landscape & Human Stories
– Lived by People
– Layers of data, stories, meaning
• How is it made?
– Landscape, narrative, experience
– History: social, cultural, politics & economy
– By collaborative conversation—process
• Discovered, personal, and collective
• Contexts: local, regional, national, international
• Engages civic consciousness, builds community
• Remakes civic sensibility & sense of place

22. Design & Tools for Storytelling
• City as Layers
• Layers of contextual & interpretive meaning
– artifacts: text, image, sound, movie, etc
– geo-located interpretive stories
– social media
– Links
– Organized into stories
– Tours for meta-framing
– thematic, temporal, geographic
• connected to physical world
• builds contexts for making meaning
• open-source content management (Omeka)
• embedded in public history/teacher training
• made in conjunction with the community

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26. Curatorial Practice
•Dynamic storytelling is essential
–Moses Cleveland & Dike 14
•Build cultural context
–Shaker Freeway Fight & Black Hawk Legend
•Layered multimedia story elements
–Cuyahoga River Fire
•Geo-Location & the urban physical context
•Discovery thru meta-interpretive frames (i.e. tours & search)
–Cleveland Food Traditions

27. • Cleveland Historical built to be extensible
• Tried to embed best technology & interpretive
practice
– Project management
– Technological architecture
– Built around stories not archival objects
– Requisite technical skill
• Developed strategy for extending project
– Low Cost or Open
– Provide Support
– Clear brand identity + technical features
– Emphasize partner identity & community
connections
• Constructed long-term project-management plan
Case Study:
Cleveland Historical becomes Curatescape

28. • Mobile ―Framework‖
– Robust standards-based, open, content management using Omeka
– Mobile apps & mobile optimized Web; i.e. clevelandhistorical.org
• Architecture emphasizes interpretation
– Geo-located stories
– Tours as thematic, geographic, temporal context
– Interpretive storytelling
– Layered archival content
– Multi-media: text, images, audio, and video
• Social, educational and community context
– Social sharing, comments, authors, links
• Print and Physical context
– QR (Quick Response) codes for interactivity (eventually NFC)
– Templates for posters, window clings, tours brochures

29. A Tool for Mobile
Curation
Spokane (Eastern Washington University)
New Orleans (UNO & Tulane)
Geauga County (Century Village Museum)
Explore Baltimore (Baltimore Heritage Inc.)
Explore Medina (Medina Schools)
Explore KY History (KY Historical Society)
Explore CU (University of Illinois)
Discover St. Paul (Historic St. Paul)
Historic Mt. Pleasant (Main Street Mt.
Pleasant)
Scioto Historical (Shawnee State University)
NW PA Heritage (Allegheny College)
Sakonnet Historical (Brown University)
Hoosier Historical (IUPUI, Statewide)
Reno Historical (University of Nevada)
Arcadiana Historical (University of Louisiana)
Smithsonian Gardens (Smithsonian Institution)

30. Public Curation as Performance
• Julio Cortazar wanted literature to be like improvisation
jazz
• http://urbanhumanist.org/digital-humanities-as-jazz/
• Cortazar wanted a literature of takes, of brilliant
improvisations whose beauty lay in the moment not in
recorded and edited perfection
• Imagine DH as a series of improvisations
• demands the extemporaneous skills of the classroom
• of building public communities
• of meeting the demands of collaboration and exchange
• of speaking with not to the audience
• like open source it is at its most dynamic when the
community determines the direction of development
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32. Performing Digital Humanities
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• Creating Events (i.e. tours)
• Phone only, docent-led, hybrids
• Walk, bike, auto?
• Classroom as performance
• Students build content, tours, or
just explore
• Content development as
performance
• Crowdsourcing, community
sourcing, and teaching
• Marketing as performance
• Downloading from app store as
―call to action‖
• Re-branding space
• Discovery through window
clings, QR codes, or NFC?

33. Building Community
• Community Sourcing
–Training collaborators
–Collaboration builds engagement
• Impact
–12,000 downloads
–300 CSU students
–100 community members/organizations
–30 teachers + students use Cleveland Historical
–25 community tours
–80K – 100K unique web visitors per year; 200K page
views
–500K words, 4K images, 1K audio clips, 100 videos in
500 stories
• Crossing the digital divide
–Multiple modes of accessibility: web, mobile, print & non-
digital project elements

34. Curatescape next challenges
• More deployments, better UX, wider functionality
• Aggregation, mashup, remix
– Federated network using metadata to connect stories
– Semantic web as a way to build contextual meaning
– Connections across projects (i.e. tours)
• Complexity: Part verse whole
• User-based data experiences
– Algorithms, ‗Itineraries,‘ and story development
• Analytics + Visitor studies
• What do we mean by ―augmented reality?‖
• Geo-location: Why?
• Indoors, multi-level, close spaces (or changing spaces?)
• Geo-caching, questing, gaming?
• Ala SCAVNGR, ARIS, or Paris Comic Street

35. Collaborative Curation Matters
• Stories & Interpretive Context as central as the Artifacts
– Landscape as history
– Materiality matters
– Layered subjectivities
– Interpretation as context
– Historical thinking
• Metadata matters
• Digitial preservation is vital
• Open is vital
– Open data (Cooper Hewitt)
– Linked data
– Open source content management

36. Mobile accentuates trends of Digital Age
• Landscapes—cityscapes, museums, the environment—have been
transformed
• We now live in pervasive learning laboratories
• Museum & classroom walls have exploded, new learning possibilities
• Aggregation & crowdsourcing powerful forces for knowledge production
• Building communities of learners/knowledge producers through
collaboration & training (i.e. community sourcing), including social markup
of archives
• Undergraduates, community members, teachers, K-12 students
• Technology training must be broad
– Coding, metadata, tools, archival management, & storytelling
• Information design matters
• Practice is Theory
• Research on user experience & learning outcomes
• Games

37. Thank You
Alternatives
Comments?
Questions?