Views and Updates from UMD iSchool students working in digital curation!
5 thoughts on “Blog Post 2”
Your observation about the uneven coverage of seemingly interchangeable or related topics struck me. How closely do the articles on digital preservation and digital curation map with each other? Should they do so more? Your hypothesis that the broad scope of digital curation undermines its article through bystander effect (more or less) seems compelling. Yet, it is the exact opposite of the problem with my article, which is short and unevenly covered, but has very specific authors and experts. What do you think is the “sweet spot” between broad and specialized that creates the most vibrant page?
The digital preservation article and the digital curation article don’t map to each other at all in my opinion. The digital preservation article clearly benefitted from a concerted effort by the WikiProject group to cover all its bases in a logically thought out structure. The digital curation article by comparison feels like random snippets. I think mirroring some of the core aspects of the digital preservation article would benefit the curation article greatly.
In terms of where the “sweet spot” is, I’m not sure I have a great answer. I will have to give it some thought.
I too am concerned about interchangeable or related topics, especially regarding your assigned Digital Curation article compared with my assigned Data Curation article, which I detail further in my own blog post. Interested to hear your thoughts!
This week’s reading from Dallas looks like it will help with making this distinction. It addresses the topic pretty directly. It should be a good starting point as it refers to many other works with similar discussions.
Thanks for bringing this to my attention, Andy!
So far I’ve found this part of the Dallas article in the “Towards a practice turn” section the most helpful in distinguishing between professional archival digital curation and scientific data curation: “An archivist (A) does the digital equivalent of putting documents in boxes. [He] is concerned with: appraisal—the selection of what documents to preserve, indexing and classification—the choice of which document to put into which box, and preservation—ensuring that the documents are preserved for posterity. […] A scientist (B) does the digital equivalent of publishing a textbook or compendium. [Her] concerns are with organization and integration of data that has been collected from other sources, with the process of annotation of this data and with the publishing and presentation of the data” (Buneman 2004).
Your observation about the uneven coverage of seemingly interchangeable or related topics struck me. How closely do the articles on digital preservation and digital curation map with each other? Should they do so more? Your hypothesis that the broad scope of digital curation undermines its article through bystander effect (more or less) seems compelling. Yet, it is the exact opposite of the problem with my article, which is short and unevenly covered, but has very specific authors and experts. What do you think is the “sweet spot” between broad and specialized that creates the most vibrant page?
The digital preservation article and the digital curation article don’t map to each other at all in my opinion. The digital preservation article clearly benefitted from a concerted effort by the WikiProject group to cover all its bases in a logically thought out structure. The digital curation article by comparison feels like random snippets. I think mirroring some of the core aspects of the digital preservation article would benefit the curation article greatly.
In terms of where the “sweet spot” is, I’m not sure I have a great answer. I will have to give it some thought.
I too am concerned about interchangeable or related topics, especially regarding your assigned Digital Curation article compared with my assigned Data Curation article, which I detail further in my own blog post. Interested to hear your thoughts!
This week’s reading from Dallas looks like it will help with making this distinction. It addresses the topic pretty directly. It should be a good starting point as it refers to many other works with similar discussions.
Thanks for bringing this to my attention, Andy!
So far I’ve found this part of the Dallas article in the “Towards a practice turn” section the most helpful in distinguishing between professional archival digital curation and scientific data curation: “An archivist (A) does the digital equivalent of putting documents in boxes. [He] is concerned with: appraisal—the selection of what documents to preserve, indexing and classification—the choice of which document to put into which box, and preservation—ensuring that the documents are preserved for posterity. […] A scientist (B) does the digital equivalent of publishing a textbook or compendium. [Her] concerns are with organization and integration of data that has been collected from other sources, with the process of annotation of this data and with the publishing and presentation of the data” (Buneman 2004).
What do you think of this?