Networked Co-Curation in Virtual Museums: Digital Humanities, History, and Social Media in the Toledo's Attic Project

Abstract

Networked co-curation is an innovative outreach practice in archives and museums using social media with other Web 2.0 technologies in order to curate digital heritage collections. It relies on crowd-sourced curation, which results in richer discourse through globally dispersed public participation and intersubjective perspectives. The theoretical framework for networked co-curation consists of three dimensions: digital history, digital humanities, and social network theory. Historical representation, intertextuality, and remediation play a vital role in networked co-curation, forming a bridge between digital content and a transforming virtual audience. Networked co-curation present three significant concerns for archives, libraries, and museums: provenance verification, knowledge representation, and staffing. Toledo's Attic has been a co-curation initiative involving multi-type organizations and their respective audiences. It has used various types of software and platforms and is now being migrated to Joomla, which has been the most robust solution thus far. The networked co-curation and outreach program for Toledo's Attic has utilized the following networks: Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, BlogSpot, Pinterest, HistoryPin, and YouTube with the Website occupying a central location for each reach to it virtual audience. Data gathered from Google Analytics and Facebook point to relationship between co-curation activities across these domains but continuous data collection is necessary for informed management of this content.