Critical curation is the process by which media (traditionally texts, but now expanded to all digital forms) is organized and displayed to best convey the information to its readers. The development of the web has made curation simultaneously easier and much more difficult. While the web allows for quick linking between a variety of media sources, as the shear volume of media increases, critical curation becomes more difficult. In attempting to understand or familiarize one’s self with a topic, information overload, the presence of extraneous details, and the forgetting the concepts previously covered occur. In this case, the web’s “world at your fingertips” mantra becomes a daunting obstacle, rather than a helpful aid. Students can get bogged down by the shear volume of information, and not retain much of the information that they find.
As digital humanities progresses, effort should be placed in attempting to better curate the knowledge surrounding humanities topics such that the are easily conveyed to the general public. While increasing information will make this task difficult, information is not useful if it is not conveyed in a meaningful way.
