Welcome to Learned, a short, weekly look at language, education, and everything else under the sun. I’m Joel, amateur linguist and professional slacker. This week, we're learning the not so gentle art of curation.
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Remember Tumblr? I still log onto it sometimes, and, although it's nowhere near the power-house of interesting content it once was, it's still a fun feed to scroll through every now and again. But, what's more interesting than the current new content, is the long, long history of things that I liked. That's a fun feed to go through and re-see all the stuff that I was once into. It's a little collection of vagaries and interests that was never meant to be permanent.
And that's something worth talking about, I think. Well, two things really: it's pretty common advice these days to both curate and occasionally purge your social media feeds. The idea is that by actively and carefully choosing what is being put into your feed by others, you can control, to some extent how your feed is going to make you feel. Some services make it easier than others to set those limits. Tumblr was one of those, Instagram was, too, until corporate overlords decided that advertising was more important than user experience, but I digress.
One of my favorite tags is "record collection." Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
So. Curate and purge. Let's get some definitions.
(One of the main reasons I keep this blog is to keep myself curious and to finding out new things. This week, that meant that learning that curate could be a noun. Huh. I've included it in the definitions below, just because, man, that is interesting.)
From the Cambridge Dictionary:
Curate
(n.) a priest of the lowest rank, especially in the Church of England, whose job is to help the vicar
(v.) (1) to be in charge of selecting and caring for objects to be shown in a museum or to form part of a collection of art, an exhibition, etc. (2) to be in charge of selecting films, performers, events, etc. to be included in a festival (3) to select things such as documents, music, products, or internet content to be included as part of a list or collection, or on a website
Purge
(v.) (1) to get rid of people from an organization because you do not agree with them (2) to make someone or something free of something evil or harmful
Right. To select things for inclusion in an exhibition, a festival, or collection and to get rid of bad things. Which, in practice, means only following things you really like and occasionally going through and weeding through that ever-expanding list and cutting away anything that's gone necrotic. Fair enough.
Only, what I think gets lost in that approach is the archive. As I mentioned above, my Tumblr, though it's been years since I actually posted anything, is as much a diary as any notebook or blog, and that has a value that shouldn't be discounted. For me, this has meant adding a second step to my curate-and-purge: download and tag.
I swear by software applications called P.I.M.s, or Personal Information Managers. They're not as popular these days, having ridden the wave of Web 2.0 into social-media obscurity, but what they are, are apps designed to collect, label, and sort all the various bits of information you (me) tend to keep around you. Rather than hunt for a file that may be buried six layers deep in your documents folder, you simply search in the app and the file you need will be found, along with as much metadata as you have cared to add.
Since I'm not sure how much longer Tumblr (or Flickr, or Delicious, or LiveJournal, or any other service) will still be around, I've taken to downloading all my data, sticking it into DevonThink (my P.I.M. of choice) and tagging it all with as much situational data as I can find - the date, the author, the original hosting site, etc. - and forgetting about it for months or years until I need inspiration or relaxation and then...it's all there ready to be browsed and remembered.
“Things Organized Neatly” is another. Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash
This all takes a lot of time, of course, but it's one of the projects I've decided to tackle during the quarantine. It ticks a few key boxes - I find it relaxing to see all the stuff I used to like, it's a kind of cleaning, and, since I can't seem to tear myself away from the computer for very long, it's more productive than merely scrolling through (my heavily-curated) Twitter feed.
Anyway. That's it for this week. I'm off to go find out what a curate's robes look like in case there's ever another chance to go trick-or-treating.
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Stay safe, stay curious. Learn something.
Joel