Digital Curation: Optimizing Literary Study

I propose that the department increase its usage of online curation tools.

Curation is a staple of the digital experience is a big part of popular online services like Pinterest and Flickr, YouTube’s Playlists, and Diigo. With Google+, one can even curate and organize their friends. For academic purposes, curation can be up-to-the-minute crowdsourced research on a student’s topic of choice. 

Traditional sources for curated content include academic journals and printed books. These resources are invaluable to much literary study and analysis by providing context for the work and to bring people into the conversations surrounding the work. However, an individual must often go to a library, a store, or (more recently) subscribe to an costly online database like JSTOR to access these treasures. If they use a library, they cannot make notes in the book to help themselves process its contents and pick out what parts are useful. Additionally, since these traditional sources and the usual ways of finding them involve few if any human sources to recommend the best titles, what the student does access may be an off-target, barely relevant, or simply incomplete resource for the topic at hand.

The department and its students would greatly benefit by have students research and curate together using online tools. If two students are studying similar topics, digital curation will help them easily access each other’s research as well as the research and resource recommendations of tens of other amateurs, students, and scholars. With a more efficient and current research system, students will use the curation tools of the digital age to become more knowledgeable scholars and analysts in their fields of interest, leading to lifelong learning and teaching.

A Working Post: A Best Practices Guide to Citizen Journalism

Main Purpose: to create a guide for citizen journalists who are just entering the field and need information on the ethics of their content, the best outlets for their content, and how to work with media professionals.

Preliminary Exploration: I began by reading Dan Gillmor's We the Media, which gave me a foundation in the beginnings and importance of citizen journalism. Much of my current and relevant information has come through the articles that Google Alerts sends me for my searches (citizen journalism, grassroots journalism, participatory journalism). I've also poked around on websites completely devoted to publishing citizen journalism.

Relevance to Digital Culture and My Audience: With new technology making it easier every day for ordinary citizens to take high-quality photos and videos, as well as share text-based articles online, citizen journalism has come to the forefront of many people's minds, including but not limited to media professionals. People often get their news socially, perhaps through an article shared over Facebook, rather than going to the same professional media source regularly. My audience--the citizen--has had very little formal education in journalism, yet is expected to create content comparable in quality and truthfulness to someone who has been professionally trained in the field. This guide will give information and resources for further learning.

Format: This project will take the form of an ebook.

Budding Thoughts on Citizen Journalism (and more on Google alert curation)

A video review of Dan Gillmor's book is coming soon, but in the meantime I thought I'd give a quick update on my thoughts with citizen journalism as a broader topic. As I've continued to curate content using Google alerts, I've come across some useful articles and some not-so-useful articles, which I fully expected. Luckily, it's easy to filter out the bad ones quickly.

Funding and Audience Participation

Image by Howard Lake

Through two articles in particular (one article on a Chinese man changing up his journalism career and crowd-funding his entire income, and another article on a new news outlet in Philadelphia to be run by "an army of citizens" who are interested in having a say on how the city runs), I've had some new thoughts.

For one thing, economics play an interesting role in this new form of journalism. The two articles I've mentioned take it as a positive that only stories that the public finds interesting will be funded. In many ways this makes participatory journalism not only about more citizens participating in the creation of news, but also its funding.

My Own Contribution

I'd like to also take my participation in news up a notch from a simple consumer to a true contributor by using both my personal passions and skills and the information I've gleaned in my research. My thinking so far has led me to the idea of compiling and laying out a guide to good citizen journalism using the information I gather. As I've mentioned before, I love design and editing, and I'm sure this will be a good mix of new information and my own expertise. The book (or short guide) will, of course, be available for free online.

Where Next?

Aside from the obvious of gathering more information to compile into the guide I've talked about, I also need to figure out the best way to get my creation into circulation. Something I need to focus more on is social connections and proof in networks that would care about such a publication. While Google alerts has been a great tool for research, I need to find another tool that is more suited for social connection. More to come there. I also should decide what I want the final format of my guide to be (a simple PDF? Many file types that can be read on e-readers?). 

Curating Youtube (with my Topic)

My original idea for my topic was to look at "the person behind the content" and how they decide where to put their ideas from all the digital tools and outlets there are online (how does someone pick between uploading a video straight to a blog verses putting it on YouTube or Vimeo, what makes it different for one person, etc). This idea has kind of morphed now into authors on the internet. I suppose my thesis is that authors can no longer be successful (or at least it is very difficult to get successful) without putting themselves out there in the digital world to get exposure. Using YouTube, I've found out a lot about what successful authors think about the written word becoming a digital phenomenon.

First I searched "authors on youtube" and found the channel Meet Our Authors. They don't have very many views on their videos, but they are still videos on authors doing readings and explaining their works. Ironically, one of their videos is "Captain Ahab vs The Wind." Spoiler alert: it has nothing to do with writing or Moby Dick.

I then scrolled down just a bit more to find the channel Talks at Google. One of their tags is author's@google so I pulled up a different window and searched that tag as well. There are videos on authors talking directly about digital culture, like Tom Standage. There are authors just talking about their works and themselves. Either way, these authors are taking advantage of YouTube, as well as other digital sources available online. The authors@google has a blog, the project Talks at Google as a twitter account and this post talks about the Google Talks project and the authors that have featured there, as well as links to free audiobooks by those authors (another way authors are getting out there - audiobooks!).

So there's a lot to look at and research. I have lots of videos to watch by the authors themselves and I'll have to comb through to find the videos directly talking about putting their work out there in the digital world and how they feel about it, but I've gotten more info than I thought I actually would using YouTube as a curation tool.

Do you guys know of any authors that have utilized the internet to connect with their readers or get their work out there?

Exploring Wikis

I'm sure all of you have been to Wikipedia, which is probably the most popular wiki. Although all of my high school teachers told me to never cite Wikipedia in an academic paper, I've had some college professors who are ok with it. Wikis seem to be gaining more respect in the academic world. They are emerging as a collaborative way for researchers to document and write about their findings. I did some research about the history of the wiki, and here is what I found, on wikipedia of course.

"A wiki is usually a web application which allows people to add, modify, or delete content in a collaboration with others. Text is usually written using a simplified markup language or a rich-text editor."

"Wikis can serve many different purposes both public and private, including knowledge management, notetaking, community websites and intranets."

Ward Cunningham invented the wiki, and the word "wiki" is Hawaiian for "fast" or "quick."

Academic Uses

• Wikis have been used as a language learning tool. 
• Professors, students, and researchers have used wikis as a publishing and review tool.
• Teachers have used wikis for their classes.
• Wikis are also just used a source of information about a topic like Dr. Burton's wiki on rhetoric.

There are also wiktionaries, which are wiki dictionaries. I'd like to do start off using the wiki I create as a wiktionary probably. I would define terms that are specific to different internet subcultures or just choose one subculture to focus on and create a wiktionary about the terms members of that subculture use to communicate.

Pop Culture Uses
Wikis are also used for less scholarly pursuits. There are wikis that detail specific popular games, movies, TV shows, books, etc. For example there is a wiki for Final Fantasy, World of Warcraft, Marvel comics movies, The Hunger Games, and more.

I think creating my own wiki will be fun, and since I am applying for the master's program in linguistics at BYU, it will be a good research tool for me. It is nice to have a place where you can organize information from different sources relating to the same topic.

Youtube - Actual Curation and Academics

I realize in my last YouTube research post, I didn't focus too much on the academics behind it or curation and how the video site integrates that. I guess that's an example of posting our drafts and research while in progress - my post wasn't really about curation, even though that's what I said I did in my title! So here I'm going to look at the use of playlists and how that curates content.

YouTube adds a visual to the literal. There's a difference between reading a "how to" book or Wikihow and watching a "how to" video (what's more fun when learning to tie a tie, this guy with nice music in the background or pictures that look like they were drawn in the 90s?).There's something more than just reading about Marshall McLuhan and watching his interviews and see him talking about what he's writing (I say Marshall McLuhan because I've been researching him for our book project). As a visual learner, I think that's why YouTube not only has success in the pop culture aspect of the digital world, but the academic world as well.

I just want to point out quickly some different ways Youtube curates content before talking about playlists and academics: the suggested videos on the side about what you're interested in, tags on videos, annotations that include links in videos to related topics, and view count (including likes and dislikes) all curate content. MarketingProf’s Chief Content Officer Ann Handley said "content curation is the act of continually identifying, selecting and sharing the best and most relevant online content and other online resources (and by that I mean articles, blog posts, videos, photos [etc]) on a specific subject to match the needs of a specific audience." So for YouTube, we find reliable sources based on us watching certain videos, the cookies of our searches on the computer that websites analyze to help suggest content to view, the tags we search and the YouTubers we deem reliable after giving them our attention.

So what are the good ways in which YouTube has promoted academic content, or at least authoritative content? It preserves content, for one thing. When I was searching Marshall McLuhan, one of the first things that popped up were playlists made by random people (without lots of subscribers or views) collecting his interviews and putting them all into one list. So how did I pick one playlist over another? And what gives these YouTubers with hardly any views or followers rights over another? Well for one thing - these playlist creators spent enough free time to make a playlist on their own about Marshall McLuhan. If they didn't care, do you think they'd waste time putting a playlist together? I wouldn't. Also: by looking at the titles and video icons, I can tell which interviews are actually about the subject I'm researching and which aren't. Plus all these videos are interviews and content right from television or radio stations and put right into a video. Can't get more reliable than a video of the actual author himself. So what improvements can be made to create reliability behind curation and content?

I'm not really sure I have an answer to that yet. I had a brief thought that if profiles on YouTube were more important to look at than the actual videos, the people behind the uploads would be more reliable. But you know...I don't think that's true. Part of this class is about finding what's on the internet and deciding what's good content vs the anthologies the rest of our classes require us to read because that's "reliable and scholarly." I don't know anything about the three or five or ten anthology writers with expertise and doctorates to make them more reliable than the video upload or blog post. And to be honest, I'd much prefer to spend my time reading something that motivates people enough to create a video response to a book or write a blog post or create a playlist of everything their favorite author has made an appearance in. There is something raw and real about people with pure intent and interest in something. It's more personal to research the every day person writing/vlogging/etc about something that interests them than reading a 5000 paged book with big words and a hundred patents and twelve editions. And in the end, one person making a video or post about something they care about makes them more than ordinary. It makes them an active participant in something greater. It involves them in a community of learning that unfortunately many universities and schools are too scared to find useful yet.

But times are changing just as the digital world is. Maybe we'll stop being book snobs and be all-media-accepting some day.

YouTube Curation

So I'm looking further into YouTube curation. What I've realized more and more in my research is that this isn't just about putting up videos and getting a lot of hits. It's about advertising yourself, your product, your talents, your history, your world. People use YouTube academically, for entertainment, for literal advertisements, for business, for anything and everything. There's so much more to it than just making videos.

First, here's a link to why the advertisements on YouTube (that most viewers find annoying) actually turn out to be successful for those advertising companies. It's a playlist called YouTube Case Studies.

There's even a page on YouTube telling potential advertisers Why It Works. YouTube only charges when people watch your ad. It provides a targeted audience for companies looking to advertise. It's not just ads on television where someone can change the screen, but it provides videos across the internet which means people with access to computers, phones, tablets, etc can see the ad. There are analytic tools that give stats on who's viewing a company's ad and these companies can build a following by making their own channel.

Of course YouTube also has their Partnership Program to help their creators. And of course here's the list of the top 100 most subscribed channels where every day people are making it on the internet (just ignore the music channels like Rihanna and One Direction). To check out success stories just type in Draw My Life and there will be plenty of youtubers who talk about how they ended up making videos and how this channel changed their life. This video is long, but it incorporates a lot of how collaboration, crowdsourcing, and just using the things available to you will get you to where you want to be:

(sWooZie's Draw My Life video)

Of course there is the academic side of YouTube that I'd like to explore too. Having plays up to watch in parts (which I do for my Shakespeare class), watching PBS or Discovery, or even uploading AP Literature projects or class projects is a fun way to get information out there. In class we discussed how sometimes we search online how to do things for a visual on what to do. So I suppose one of the questions I'll have to look into more is what makes the source qualified or authoritative?

I'm still working on getting more information and everything, but. I'm really excited to explore this more.

A Brief Introduction to Tumblr

Allow me to briefly introduce you to Tumblr. Tumblr is a microblogging site which to me straddles Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest in style. As of October 14, 2013, it hosts more than 141.5 million blogs (called tumblrs by some, including me). Users can post original content as well as content which belongs to or originated from someone else.

Before I start linking to various tumblrs, here is a hefty content warning. As with any blog or news feed, your experience with Tumblr is what you make it, but it is more difficult to find a completely family-friendly environment. Tumblr has no language controls. Usernames and comments often can contain profane language. How often you come across them depends on which tumblrs/users you "follow," but it's difficult to avoid. This lack of editing also carries over into visual content, but in my experience it's easier to avoid than bad language. The only nudity I've seen on Tumblr is in Renaissance art. Many, though not all, of the links on this page will have some profane language in their destinations.

In my experience, most people use it for nonacademic purposes, such as to express and geek out over various fandoms. These tumblrs often include gifs [x], which some find very annoying. (Again, you can usually avoid them depending on whom you follow.) Of course there are many jokes [x], but there is also some thoughtful fandom- [x] and non-fandom-related analysis. I have found promotional photography/personal blogs [x], cosplay blogs where people swap advice about cosplaying [x], a Herman Melville reading blog [x], and commercial, official, political academic, and academic hobby blogs (see: [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x]. By the way linking with the [x] is common on Tumblr, though I may be overusing it in this post). 

As I see it, Tumblr has a lot of potential but has not yet fully matured as a microblogging platform. There is a huge potential audience; a post with Queen Elizabeth inspecting her grandsons in the military has over 400,000 "notes" (instances where someone likes or shares a post). Current barriers to growth, though growth is definitely happening, include Tumblr's reputation for being a time-wasting/gif-ridden/NSFW site and the poor designs of some tumblrs (if you've clicked on all my links, you'll find a couple of examples). However, it has a lot of influence and potential. As amateur analysis occasionally makes the rounds already, I believe that more "serious" content can and should become more prolific. I look forward to seeing more advertising done for more serious tumblrs so that the platform will be better utilized as an engine for discussion, action, education, and change.