Online Curation Research Articles

Building a nationally representative sample of teachers’ online and offline: the Public Instructional Network of School Resources

The emerging big data allows educational studies to examine teaching and learning behaviors over time and at scale. Less available is population-representative big data. This paper builds the first nationally representative sample of teachers’ online curation on a social media platform (i.e. Pinterest), the Public Instructional Network of School Resources (PINSR). This effort includes developing a big-rich data sampling framework, integrating social media data with administrative and census “ground truth” sources, and validating the population representativeness. Finally, we employ PINSR and present a worked example of teachers’ social media curation behavioral patterns across regions and time.

The role of social media followers’ agency in influencer marketing: a study based on the heuristic–systematic model of information processing

An increasing number of social media influencers have incorporated product recommendations into the online curation of their daily lifestyles through intimate self-disclosures (ISDs). While greater attention has been paid to the marketing potential of influencers, how social media followers respond to influencers’ ISDs remains understudied. This study examines the psychosocial mechanisms underlying the effect of influencers’ ISDs on followers’ purchase intentions by integrating the relational communication perspective and the heuristic–systematic model of information processing. Data were collected through an online survey service in China, and hypotheses were tested through structural equation modelling and conditional process analysis. The statistical results indicated that the effect of influencers’ ISDs on followers’ purchase intentions is sequentially mediated by perceived altruistic motives behind influencers’ products recommendation and followers’ attitudes toward recommended products. Further, this serial mediation effect is moderated by followers’ message involvement and product knowledge. The managerial and theoretical implications of the above findings are discussed.

Curator Economy w Chinach – odpowiedź na specyfikę rynku czy zapowiedź nadchodzących zmian w światowym handlu elektronicznym?

China’s Curator Economy. A market-specific response or a harbinger of upcoming changes in global e-commerce? Until recently, online curation was mainly associated with the creative industries and digital products, but, nowadays, in China, one can observe a trend of expanding its scope also to the most popular product groups of e-commerce, such as cosmetics, apparel or food. A review of the most important technological, economic and cultural trends shows that while the Middle Kingdom has had extremely favourable conditions for the curator economy to flourish, in the near future it may start spreading to the rest of the world. Curating activities that reduce the choice overload, induce additional reflection before buying products, and make consumers less susceptible to the marketing messages, could be an important element in the developed countries’ pursuit towards sustainability.

A Representation Protocol for Traditional Crafts

A protocol for the representation of traditional crafts and the tools to implement this are proposed. The proposed protocol is a method for the systematic collection and organization of digital assets and knowledge, their representation into a formal model, and their utilization for research, education, and preservation. A set of digital tools accompanies this protocol that enables the online curation of craft representations. The proposed approach was elaborated and evaluated with craft practitioners in three case studies. Lessons learned are shared and an outlook for future work is provided.

Correlating affect and emotion: Covidiquette and the expanding curation of online persona(s)

Over the last 25 years, major research in media and cultural studies has investigated the play of affect in our cultures. ‘Affect’, as a term derived from its neurophysiological and psychological origins, defines the particular movement of feeling from sensation to its attribution as an identifiable emotion. This article explores the way that ‘affect’ to emotion is being curated online by users particularly of social media as they learn to structure how they are perceived in online culture by others. It also investigates how the specific correlating of affect to emotion is one of the essential algorithmically generated activities of social media and online corporations. To discern this flow of affect and emotion, the article works to identify how this online cultural pandemic has intersected with the COVID-19 pandemic and produced a new level and intensity of affect and emotion curation as greater parts of our connected cultures are being managed and moderated by ourselves as well as governments, corporations and institutions. The neologism ‘covidiquette’ is used to describe this new form of online curation of cultures, and a further pandemic expansion of this movement of affect into attribution – transnationally, governmentally and commercially. Key pathways for investigating this correlation – and curation – of affect are analysed in this paper during 2020 and 2021 and the ever-presence of COVID-19 and its unique capacity to produce a proliferation of sharing, connection and – critically – surveillance.

Transgender identity management across social media platforms

Transgender people use social media for identity work, which takes place over time and across platforms. In this study, we interviewed 20 transgender social media users to examine transgender identity management across the social media ecosystem. We found that transgender social media users curate their social media experiences to fit their needs through creating accounts on different platforms, maintaining multiple accounts on individual platforms, and making active decisions about content they post, networks they are connected to, and content they interact with. In this way, transgender people’s social media curation is not limited to their own identity presentations, but also involves curating the content they see from others and whom they include in their networks. Together, these two types of online curation enable transgender social media users to craft social media worlds that meet their social and self-presentational needs.

Consumer brand curation on social shopping sites

Consumers engage in online curation using branded items (e.g., product images) on social shopping websites (i.e., sites that combine commerce and social media) in ways that can have important implications for fashion brands. Beyond being passive recipients of a brand’s marketing message, consumers now actively participate in co-creating the brand by combining brands and presenting them to others, generating novel co-branding connections and revising brand categorization. We use behavioral data collected from two communities on a popular social shopping site (Polyvore.com) and employ a clustering technique to demonstrate that curating consumers are assembling different brands together, thus creating implicit brand associations. We additionally conduct an analysis of curated fashion displays to understand which features make a display more popular. Looking at consumer curation behavior on social shopping sites, fashion brand managers can better understand the ways in which their brands’ images are being co-created by consumers.

Curadoria digital no contexto artístico e cultural: possibilidades de reuso de dados de arte

Objetivo: Por meio da iniciativa de várias instituições, muitos acervos culturais foram digitalizados, gerando material que possui grande potencial de reuso. A presente pesquisa busca identificar quais são os tipos de reuso realizados nas instituições culturais, com base nos princípios da curadoria digital. Método: A pesquisa parte de uma amostra específica dos agregadores/instituições presentes na Europeana Collections. A partir de requisitos específicos estipulados, quatro instituições foram selecionadas. Um levantamento das práticas existentes foi realizado, bem como sua posterior sistematização em sete categorias fundamentadas na literatura de curadoria digital, a saber: Agregações, Espaço Colaborativo, Curadoria Online, Educação, Pesquisa Científica, Aplicativos Computacionais e Serviços Comerciais. Resultado: Constatou-se que uma das quatro instituições selecionadas pratica todas as categorias de reuso e as demais instituições praticam três ou mais das atividades investigadas. Foram identificados dezesseis tipos de reuso de dados de arte, tais como: produção de materiais derivados de imagens, reinterpretações, campos para comentários, programação algorítmica de recomendação através de dados fornecidos pelo visitante, exposições online com curadoria interna e externa/colaborativa, entre outros. Conclusões: A expansão para o mundo digital das coleções das instituições culturais resulta em novas possibilidades em termos de serviços, produtos, entretenimento, ação educativa e pesquisa. Além disso, faz nascer uma maior aproximação e interação com o público, estimulando a visitação presencial. Propicia o contato com coleções de valor, criando uma “deselitização” dos grandes acervos e promovendo a visibilidade de coleções de culturas locais. Pode ainda fomentar a indústria criativa e valorizar o trabalho das unidades de informação pertencentes às instituições culturais.

The Effective Type of Information Categorization in Online Curation Service Depending on Psychological Ownership

With the development of the Internet, consumers can acquire a variety of information; however, as the amount of information continuously increases, it becomes difficult for consumers to make decisions. In this era of information overload, online curation services are emerging to help consumers choose the information they want. In these online services, information is grouped and classified according to certain criteria and presented to consumers. In this context, there are typical goal-derived and taxonomic categories in the method of structuring information. This study investigated the effect of category types on the categorization attitude of consumers according to their psychological ownership of online services. To this end, this study confirmed the interaction effect of category types (goal-derived vs. taxonomic) and the degree of psychological ownership (higher vs. lower). As a result, users with higher (as opposed to lower) psychological ownership of online curation services revealed a more effective attitude toward categorization in the goal-derived (as opposed to taxonomic) type. The results of this study suggest implications on how to structure information in consideration of the psychological state of consumers in an online context and are expected to be useful guidelines for practitioners such as service providers, marketers, and UX(User Experience)/UI(User Interface) designers.

Reading Island Voices: issues around the primacy of speech and the privileging of literacy, from a Hebridean viewpoint

ABSTRACTDivergent views on the relative value or status of spoken and written language skills may contribute to a disconnect between lay community members and language professionals, activists, or academics, and conflicted approaches to language support, teaching and/or revitalisation. Taking the bilingual Outer Hebrides as a case study, an online language capture and curation project is described which attempts to engage with these issues, acknowledging an important place for Reading Aloud in the range of strategies employed.

Community curation in PomBase: enabling fission yeast experts to provide detailed, standardized, sharable annotation from research publications

Maximizing the impact and value of scientific research requires efficient knowledge distribution, which increasingly depends on the integration of standardized published data into online databases. To make data integration more comprehensive and efficient for fission yeast research, PomBase has pioneered a community curation effort that engages publication authors directly in FAIR-sharing of data representing detailed biological knowledge from hypothesis-driven experiments. Canto, an intuitive online curation tool that enables biologists to describe their detailed functional data using shared ontologies, forms the core of PomBase’s system. With 8 years’ experience, and as the author response rate reaches 50%, we review community curation progress and the insights we have gained from the project. We highlight incentives and nudges we deploy to maximize participation, and summarize project outcomes, which include increased knowledge integration and dissemination as well as the unanticipated added value arising from co-curation by publication authors and professional curators.

Exploring online consumer curation as user-generated content

Purpose Some consumers are engaged in online curation, a type of user-generated content, in ways that can be impactful for brands. An example of online curation includes organizing themed collections of product images on Pinterest. The purpose of this paper is to present a framework of online consumer curation, introducing this topic to the marketing literature. Design/methodology/approach Through the analysis of the business and academic literature, as well as a careful study of many examples of online consumer curation, the authors present a framework for understanding online consumer curation. Findings The actions taken by online consumer curators are similar to those of museum or art gallery curators: acquiring, selecting, organizing and displaying content for an audience. The motivations for consumers to engage in online curation include building/displaying their identities and making social connections with their online audience. One outcome possible for the audience that views the curation is gaining access to carefully selected and recommended content. Research limitations/implications As online consumer curation is a new area of research, the authors suggest several marketing- and brand-relevant propositions that can be addressed in future research. Practical implications As consumers are frequently using product images and brand symbols in their online curation, it is important for marketing academics and practitioners to understand their actions. Originality/value The aim of the paper is to present a thorough introduction to the idea of online consumer curation by outlining relevant examples, providing a framework for understanding this activity and its implications for brand management, and listing ideas for future research.

Networked Co-Curation: An Exploration of the Socio-Technical Specificities of Online Curation

Online curation is shaped and defined not merely by its content, but just as much by the nature of the structure and the systems that are used by curators and artists. It could be argued that this applies to any medium, but as this essay will show, the Web profoundly influences the role of the curator in new ways. In this paper we show how curation on the Web is not merely concerned with presenting art, but that curation functions within a wider ecology of social and technical power relations. This shift is characterized by a collision of different interests driven by economic, cultural, and socio-political agendas, and can be framed as a new space of performativity: signaling a move from curating a set of objects to a conceptual and operational process that puts different constellations of human and machinic agents, objects and practices into relation with one another. This means that a curator needs to take into account a complex interrelated network of dependencies and contexts that are often invisible or incomprehensible to most people. In such a scenario online curation becomes ‘networked co-curation’ and shifts the attention from what is produced to how it is performed under the socio-technical conditions and relations that characterize the current state of the Web.

“Becoming an expert in driving for Uber”: Uber driver/bloggers’ performance of expertise and self-presentation on YouTube

There is a new cast of self-proclaimed experts offering “how-to-succeed” resources aimed at coaching and inspiring gig workers. The emergence of such resources raises questions about the performance of expertise regarding the workings of algorithmic labor platforms. This article examines how Uber driver/bloggers—workers who are driving for Uber, while also creating Uber-related video content—perform expertise in driving for Uber on YouTube. I conducted in-depth interviews with 11 driver/bloggers and a qualitative analysis of the textual and video content published by driver/bloggers. Through the data, I show how driver/bloggers’ empowerment narratives became intertwined with their individualistic aspirations to develop dual careers as Uber drivers and YouTubers. Driver/bloggers employed three self-presentation strategies to perform expertise, including the construction of uniqueness and “know-how,” realness, and relatability with audiences. The study concludes with implications for our collective understandings of gig workers, expertise, and online curation across a wider platform ecology.

The Erosion of Publisher Liability in American Law, Section 230, and the Future of Online Curation

As internet businesses started to emerge in the 1990s, online content distributors were taken to court for defamatory material they published or republished. While one court found in Cubby v. CompuServe (1991) that the internet-based company was not liable, a second court trying Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy (1995) arrived at the opposite conclusion. Congress resolved the ambiguity by enacting the Communications Decency Act of 1996, of which Section 230 established a broad liability shield for online content distributors. Two decades later, Section 230 has come under scrutiny, and many critics and lawmakers characterize it as a drastic deviation from common law that should be corrected. However, an examination of the relevant caselaw reveals that courts had instead narrowed liability for publishers, republishers, and distributors for decades culminating in the Cubby decision. Section 230, we suggest, codified this process, establishing a publisher liability regime that would have likely emerged in common law. Based on this legal history, we discuss the circumstances under which mandated online content takedown could be prudent and practicable and also under which continuing Section 230 protections may prove necessary.

Curse: building expression atlases and co-expression networks from public RNA-Seq data.

Public RNA-Sequencing (RNA-Seq) datasets are a valuable resource for transcriptome analyses, but their accessibility is hindered by the imperfect quality and presentation of their metadata and by the complexity of processing raw sequencing data. The Curse suite was created to alleviate these problems. It consists of an online curation tool named Curse to efficiently build compendia of experiments hosted on the Sequence Read Archive, and a lightweight pipeline named Prose to download and process the RNA-Seq data into expression atlases and co-expression networks. Curse networks showed improved linking of functionally related genes compared to the state-of-the-art. Curse, Prose and their manuals are available at http://bioinformatics.psb.ugent.be/webtools/Curse/. Prose was implemented in Java. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Textpresso Central: a customizable platform for searching, text mining, viewing, and curating biomedical literature

BackgroundThe biomedical literature continues to grow at a rapid pace, making the challenge of knowledge retrieval and extraction ever greater. Tools that provide a means to search and mine the full text of literature thus represent an important way by which the efficiency of these processes can be improved.ResultsWe describe the next generation of the Textpresso information retrieval system, Textpresso Central (TPC). TPC builds on the strengths of the original system by expanding the full text corpus to include the PubMed Central Open Access Subset (PMC OA), as well as the WormBase C. elegans bibliography. In addition, TPC allows users to create a customized corpus by uploading and processing documents of their choosing. TPC is UIMA compliant, to facilitate compatibility with external processing modules, and takes advantage of Lucene indexing and search technology for efficient handling of millions of full text documents.Like Textpresso, TPC searches can be performed using keywords and/or categories (semantically related groups of terms), but to provide better context for interpreting and validating queries, search results may now be viewed as highlighted passages in the context of full text. To facilitate biocuration efforts, TPC also allows users to select text spans from the full text and annotate them, create customized curation forms for any data type, and send resulting annotations to external curation databases. As an example of such a curation form, we describe integration of TPC with the Noctua curation tool developed by the Gene Ontology (GO) Consortium.ConclusionTextpresso Central is an online literature search and curation platform that enables biocurators and biomedical researchers to search and mine the full text of literature by integrating keyword and category searches with viewing search results in the context of the full text. It also allows users to create customized curation interfaces, use those interfaces to make annotations linked to supporting evidence statements, and then send those annotations to any database in the world.Textpresso Central URL: http://www.textpresso.org/tpc

‘22 Push-Ups for a Cause’: Depicting the Moral Self via Social Media Campaign #Mission22

In 2016, the online cause #Mission22 went viral on social media. Established to raise awareness about high suicide rates among US military veterans, the campaign involves users posting a video of themselves doing 22 push-ups for 22 days, and on some platforms, to donate and recruit others to do the same. Based on a ‘big data’ analysis of Twitter data (over 225,883 unique tweets) during the height of the campaign, this article uses #Mission22 as a site in which to analyse how people depict, self-represent and self-tell as moral subjects using social media campaigns. In addition to spotlighting how such movements are mobilised to portray moral selves in particular ways, the analysis focuses on how a specific online cause like #Mission22 becomes popularly supported from a plethora of possible causes and how this selection and support is shaped by online networks. We speculate that part of the reason why Mission22 went ‘viral’ in the highly competitive attention economies of social media environments was related to visual depictions of affective bodily, fitness and moral practices.

The roles of tagging in the online curation of photographs

This paper explores the variety of uses people make of the tagging feature on the photo-sharing site Flickr. The site developers intended uses are primarily to build a taxonomy to make the images on the site easily searchable. Data from examples of Flickr tags and interviews with selected users reveal that some tagging fits with this aim, whilst other uses challenge and subvert the intended uses. Tagging is used to do at least the following: identifying existing information in a photo; adding relevant new information; expressing affective stance towards the images; addressing specific audiences; making unrelated ‘asides’; and for creative play. The discussion is then broadened by examining a dispute between Flickr and its users about changes being made to the site: this act as a ‘telling case’ (Mitchell, 1984) as people articulate what the site enables them to do and what it hinders. The dispute generated a thread of more than 29,000 comments, making a corpus of 1,774,401 words. Using corpus linguistics tools the paper demonstrates how users contribute to curating this site, including their uses of tagging. Steps involved in curating the site are identified, including a focus on verbs of curation. Overall, the paper contributes to the analysis of a set of ‘new’ literacy practices and to understanding digital curation. The methods of the two studies reported here productively combine detailed methods of qualitative research with the breadth of quantitative analysis.

Tracing networked images: an emerging method for online curation

ABSTRACTThe rapidity with which images circulate across the Internet has multiplied their contexts of reception and patterns of interpretation. This poses some challenges for the work of the online curator who neither relies on the physical space of the art gallery nor on the photographic frame to designate context and fix meaning. However, it also presents the opportunity to test new conceptual tools for dealing with networked images’ inherent fluidity. This article proposes ‘online critical tracing’ as a reflexive method to begin charting, connecting and critically examining the unstable flow of networked images. The method develops from my tracing of a specific visual object – a T-shirt commercialised by the Swedish international retailer H&M patterned with the statement ‘this image is not available in your country’. Reflecting back on this experiment, I examine a number of implications that conditions of image circulation have for online curation, namely problems of commodification, interpretation and aesthetics. While attempting to situate this method theoretically, I highlight the challenges and possibilities it might open up for the curation of networked images.