A List Apart: Articles: The Content Strategist as Digital Curator

That's what I've been doing in one form or another as long as I've been online, well ahead of the buzz . Recognition is past due but I hope it doesn't ruin the fun for me.

The term “curate” is the interactive world’s new buzzword. During content creation and governance discussions, client pitches and creative brainstorms, I've watched this word gain traction at almost warp speed. As a transplant from museums and libraries into interactive media, I can't help but ask what is it about this word that deserves redefinition for the web?

Curation has a distinguished history in cultural institutions. In galleries and museums, curators use judgment and a refined sense of style to select and arrange art to create a narrative, evoke a response, and communicate a message. As the digital landscape becomes increasingly complex, and as businesses become ever more comfortable using the web to bring their product and audience closer, the techniques and principles of museum curatorship can inform how we create online experiences—particularly when we approach content.

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a new world order of maps

Timothy Erik Strom (Southern Cross): Space, Cyberspace and Interface: The Trouble with Google Maps. From Penn State, a series called the Geospatial Revolution Project. In the emerging field of “spatial humanities,” scholars are using mapmaking software to recreate vanished landscapes and envision history as it really happened. Mapmaking has a new challenge far more involved than depicting the traits of the physical world. A new world order of maps (Google and MapQuest) changes how we engage with cities. Creative Cartography: Here are 7 must-read books about maps. Restoring a 1770 map, found at the Brooklyn Historical Society, entailed boiling old books to get the right aged color. From Strange Maps, Fank Jacobs on Nazis up the Mississippi and other Axis invasion scenarios. From GeoJunk, while some artists use paint or charcoal, the artist Nikki Rosato prefers to make portraits of the human body using old road maps; and here is a brief history of maps. Ingenious Flat Earth Theory revealed in old map, with the Earth as an inverse toroid. From GeoCurrents, Martin W. Lewis on a key to map of geopolitical anomalies; delusional mapping: A review of The Comanche Empire by Pekka Hamalainen; and an article on microstates in cartograms. Maps with only words, known as “Typographic Maps”, are becoming increasingly popular (and more). Know your meme: “The World According to X” (a.k.a “How X Sees the World” or “The X World”) is a series of world map satires that are labeled with various geopolitical stereotypes and jokes to reflect the biased worldview of country X. Everybody, meet Kergolus: This little furry thing is a geo-mascot, shaped like the territory it symbolises. Mapping the human condition: What the empire of love has to do with the intellect forest and the bay of agoraphobia.

via bookforum.com