Enhanced Critical Curation

I thought this was a very interesting passage, as it opened my eyes to the enormous task of being a modern curator. I also was very interested by the definition of a curator as someone who crafts a story out of a multitude of information. There is so much information available to us now, and it’s becoming ever more important to sift through this information to find what is important and what is not. Before the internet, people would only save things that they thought were valuable, or things that they collected. Now, storage is so cheap that everything is saved and can exist theoretically forever.

As I mentioned in class, I am very interested in how Are.na enables everyone to become a modern curator. This also poses the question of who can be a curator, and what can be considered a museum. I believe, as I mentioned earlier, that the task of a curator is to display information in a way that the collection of data tells a story that can not just be told by one individual object or work. This is a very interesting problem in modern web development now, where we are constantly looking at new data visualization techniques. I think the modern curator can really be anyone who is trying to make sense of physical or digital data by telling a story, and I think Are.na is a fantastic platform to enable anyone to become a curator.