This is the second in a three-part series of articles on discovering who you are and what you love. I’ve been thinking about my childhood lately, mining it for clues that resonate with what I do today. Part 1 was on process, this one is on curation, and the final instalment will be about adventure.
Focus on Curation
In Part 1 of this series, I told you about my obsessive love for figure skating.
Not only did I love to skate, I wanted to know everything about it. My five scrapbooks from over the years were 90% filled with skating articles, ribbons, and other mementos. I scoured the newspapers for any mention of the sport (almost daily in Canada), cut out everything I found and lovingly placed it in my scrapbooks. They were a curated collection of information about the sport from my particular lens.
What is curation?
The ethos at the core of curation — a drive to find the interesting, meaningful, and relevant amidst the vast maze of overabundant information, creating a framework for what matters in the world and why — is an increasingly valuable form of creative and intellectual labor, a form of authorship that warrants thought. ~ Brain Pickings
What is Curation? from Percolate on Vimeo.
I’ve always had collections of things that I cared about – books, CD’s, quotes, even turtles. Curation goes beyond collecting in that its goal is to narrow the field to the most “interesting, meaningful, and relevant.”
The photo albums and journals I put together when my kids were small were a form of curation. I also started an old-style newsletter called The Parents Network, where I collected and categorized information about things to do with kids in the area. I had a mailing list of over 200 parents and printed out my newsletter every month, sending it out by snail mail.
In 2005, I joined Flickr and started sharing and organizing my photos (now over 3,000 strong).
In 2009, I joined a website called Squidoo and wrote articles about what inspired me, from musicians to photographers to environmental issues.
Blogging and social media are a form of curation. Today, my Facebook page – Adventures in Seeing – and Pinterest pages are my scrapbooks. On this blog and in my weekly letter, I share what’s inspiring me lately.
We’re all unique curators of what matters to us, whether it’s recipes, plants, or trivia.
What do you curate (or collect) and how do you share it? Have you been doing this since you were a child?