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I am interested in exploring the various ways that we discuss curation in the digital humanities, as well as models of best practice in digital humanities curation. What are great examples?

With its origins in the 14th Century, specifically in the practice of rural priests or “curates,” the word originally emphasized the caring for and attending to the souls of a parish. By the 15th century, curate became associated with legal guardianship, usually over minors. Only with the enlightenment, in the middle of the 17th century, did the word come to be associated with objects, specifically those of a museum or gallery.

More recently, with the emergence of the digital era, the definition of curate has widened, at least as suggested in a 2009 New York Times article.  It is being used by “designers, disc jockeys, club promoters, bloggers and thrift-store owners,” as a sort of code for taste.  According to NYTimes writer Alex Williams, stores “curate” their merchandise or nightclubs “curate” an evening’s entertainment, and websites “curate” their content. “Curate,” Williams wrote, “has become a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded, who seem to paste it onto any activity that involves culling and selecting.”

Curate means many things in museums and cultural institutions outside the digital realm, from building collections, to caring for those collections, to interpreting them. It stands between the work of librarians, archivists, and scholars as its own category of activity, but is in fact more multidisciplinary than peer fields. It demands subject expertise but is not subservient to it. It demands methodological expertise but is not subservient to it. It demands the rigorous of metadata practice but is not subservient to it. Digital curation has added a new dimensionality to the mix, which is technical knowledge, but even here technological knowledge is key but not a requirement.

Curation as a concept has gained new life in the digital humanities world, and is discussed clearly in the Digital Humanities Manifesto.  One popular version of this (emerging from technology communities) suggested five basic approaches to content creation: aggregation, distillation, elevation, mashup, or chronology. I found that oversimplified, without an appreciation for the humanities, but it was provocative nonetheless. Even if one adopted something, what examples might we point to as brilliant guides for digital humanists.

So, I am curious how we digital humanists understand our roles as curators. One of the best definitions from the Digital Curation Centre in the UK, proposes a definition of curation that emphasizes archival practice. Another case study about digital curation from the Library of Congress also emphasizes archival practice as the home of curation.

Both beg a larger question that I want to pose. What is the role of interpretation and research in the process of digital curation? How is digital curation an act of scholarship?  And, why not emphasize the interpretive aspects more? Surely a curator–whether digital or otherwise is more than a guardian of real or virtual objects? Aren’t we making interpretive choices?  Are their models of digital curation to which we would point colleagues and students?

Those are just some of the questions that I’m interested in finding some answers to. And, of course, I am also interested in asking the right questions, which I am perhaps not doing yet.  Broadly, this question is driven by something I am currently writing about humanities curation and content curation.

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Lots of great themes are already emerging from the pre-conference posts; allow me to add a couple thoughts about mobile, which is one of the things that I’ll be interested in discussing and learning more about.

My digital humanities research explores how one can curate a city through mobile devices. Over the past several months, this culminated in the release of Cleveland Historical (clevelandhistorical.org) with a recent news story about the project here . Our work at the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities has taken this challenge of curation into multiple educational, institutional, and digital environments over the years: from simple websites (such as that on the Cleveland Cultural Gardens) to street-level history kiosks to an extensive (700+) collection of oral histories. Our work is all crowdsourced through community-based processes, emphasizing scads of project partners sharing similar goals. Our number of partners exceeds 1000 individuals and organizations, for example.

We built Cleveland Historical using Omeka as a CMS. It includes iOS, Android, basic mobile stylesheets, and a web presence. It includes multiple layers of interpretive materials and stories that are geolocated, tours, and social media integration. We are currently making the tour features richer, integrating QR codes (easy), and building a version for regional museums (that has a different navigation strategy.)  Lots of other cool features could easily be developed, including content added directly from mobile devices and new interfaces.

We designed the project to be extensible and scalable beyond Cleveland.

In fact, Cleveland Historical is the first instance of a broader project we’re calling Mobile Historical, which is essentially a mobile publishing platform that sits atop a lightly customized Omeka installation. We will soon open a second instance of what we are terming Mobile Historical in collaboration with initiative partner Larry Cebula at Eastern Washington University. We are exploring collaborations with several other partners to help us work out the technological kinks associated with extending the platform to multiple cities/institutions. We are seeking to make the cost of each new instance ridiculously cheap (seeking only to recover costs associated with labor, maintenance, and sustainability of the mobile client.) Toward this end, we have begun moving toward connecting with Omeka.net in conjunction with our lovely friends a CHNM, hopefully making it available as part of the Omeka.net ecosystem early next year. Also, as we do this, we’ll also be developing an open-source version, which is further down the line (time-wise.) But, first things first–extending the project to a couple other sites.

Interestingly, the most critical part of our work is not the digital, but the humanities. How do we create interpretive stories for mobile, in conjunction with multiple communities as works of scholarship, teaching, and public engagement? Curating cities and collections happens collaboratively. Our larger work seeks to create a vehicle for scholars, GLAMs, and communities themselves to take charge of cultural interpretation by giving them both tools AND an intellectual community of best practices and approaches. Building this community and these best practices are well underway in different mobile settings. Even so, extending, building, and sustaining dialogues mobile interpretation is as critical to what we’re about as is the technology.