Crisis and Curation:

The Rise of Curated Crisis Content

Sophia B. Liu
Technology, Media and Society Program
University of Colorado at Boulder
Titanic

April 15, 1912

 William Yeingst, September 11 Collecting Curator,
Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History

“As curators we have great power to help

shape our national memory.
It’s a power that we use judiciously and
openly.
We have the power to determine which
objects are saved and whose stories are
told.”
Curation as a Profession
• “A person who manages, administers or organizes a
collection, either independently or employed by a museum,
library, archive or zoo…
A content specialist responsible for an institution’s collections.”
– Wikipedia and Wiktionary for “curator”

• “Curators direct the acquisition, storage, and exhibition of

collections, including negotiating and authorizing the
purchase, sale, exchange, or loan of collections. They are also
responsible for authenticating, evaluating, and categorizing
the specimens in a collection.”
– Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, Occupational Outlook
Handbook, 2010-11 Edition, Archivists, Curators, and Museum Technicians, on
the Internet athttp://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos065.htm (visited April 26, 2010).
Information Overload + Attention
Shortage
 Curatorial Dilemma
Research Aims in Two
Parts
 Part 1:
Developing the Curation Construct in a
Networked World
• Unpacked the meaning of “curation” used in
the social web world as a starting point

• Developed a theoretical construct on the notion

of socially-distributed curation

• Searched for blog posts about curation and

interviewed professional and everyday curators
Working Model of
Today’s Curatorial
Activities
 Find
Aggregate
Store

Guide Organize
Discuss Categorize

Socially-Distributed
Maintai
Present Curation n
Care for
Arrang
e Preserve
Juxtapose

Select
Craft story Filter
Weave artifacts Verify
23
 Find
Aggregate
Store

Guide Organize
Discuss Categorize

Maintai
Present n
Care for
Arrange
Preserve
Juxtapose

Craft story Verify

Weave artifacts Filter
24
 Nate Schoman
Admin for the 9/11 Truth Facebook Group

“Immediately after the WTC towers were hit, people began

videotaping the news footage of the buildings falling and
eyewitness accounts.
It got archived and distributed and hosted in several
locations. Because it was replicated thousands of times
over the internet, that means you cannot erase the
truth, which proved to be invaluable. Preservation of
information is built into the internet as they get
circulated and duplicated, quoted, reworked and
formed elsewhere…they tend to take on a life of their own,
they can’t disappear, can’t be erased…
this archival aspect is the important part.”
“Over the years, tweets have become part
of significant global events around the
world—
from historic elections to devastating
disasters.”
- Twitter
 Part 2:
Examples of Socially-Distributed Curation in
Crises

• Chose 7 historically significant events over the

past 40 years as case studies for my dissertation

• Present examples of social media artifacts that

show socially-distributed curation in action

• Qualitatively analyzed ‘natural documents’ online

and interviewed as well as probed relevant
participants
Examples of Distributed
Curation for 3 Crises
1984 Bhopal Gas Leak
2001 September 11
Attacks
Climate Change Crisis
The Value of Curation in the Crisis
Context

• Reduce the noise and provide context

• Find important, relevant, and reliable

information

• Be a steward of our history to derive cultural

meaning

• Learn from history in order to strengthen our

resilience to future crises
 Why Curation Matters to
You…
• Deliberate: Need curatorial tools to
help with the immediate and long-
term effects of a crisis situation

• Accidental: Be aware of the

potential unintended long-term
impacts and consequences of your
technologies
 Acknowledgements
U.S. National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and
Grants IIS-0546315 and IIS-0910586

Thank You

Sophia.Liu@colorado.edu
@sophiabliu
http://sophiabliu.com
http://sophiabliu.com/heritageblog