#dConstruct - the architecture of serendipity and analogue Tumblr

A really fascinating talk by Frank Chimero about curating, organising and accessing all the digital “possessions” we’re accumulating, including Likes and things we favourite, and notes we make.

The very different characteristics of digital and analogue material are certainly a fascinating topic. Analogue is owned and forces you to remember it by its presence. Digital feels like we pay for access to it, and is often invisible until we seek to find it.

Digitally, we have piles of stuff, but it’s not a physical pile  – it’s a collection of information, much of which lacks context in an accessible forms – particularly our choices to star/heart/favourite/like/+1 pieces of content. Can we put everything we like in one place? 19th Century Gentlemen did in their Commonplace books. (An analogue Tumblr blog…?) It’s “curation as authorship”.

The Creator Economy – producing and consuming in the same act

The Architecture of Serendipity

Curation is collection with an architecture of arrangement. Arrangement requires  a second pass. (I agree with that – I often give onld sections of this blog a second pass – I should do more of that with my “information buckets”) We need technology optimised for the second pass:

1. How we sort things – location, alphabet, time, category, hierarchy (latch. We tend to sort things in reverse chronological, which is great for the new, but not for things you’ve seen before. Digital is infinitely mutable – things can exist in more then one place at once.
2. **How we move through time **– content can time-shift. Instapaper allows us to postpone reading things. It’s a time machine that pushes content into your future.
3. What media is supported – Lots of women’s fashion blogs do this – they curate looks, Biblion – an iPad app that curates exhibitions specially.