Strategies of Free-Form Web Curation
Andruid Kerne, Nic Lupfer, Rhema Linder, Yin Qu, Alyssa Valdez, Ajit Kumar Jain, Kade Keith, Matthew Carrasco, Jorge A. Vanegas, Andrew Billingsley · 2017
We synthesize principles across art, design, writing, and psychology to articulate strategies of free-form web curation, for stimulating students' creative engagement with prior work, in performance of ideation tasks. We manifest the strategies in an interactive system and pedagogy. Free-form web curation is a form of new media--designed to enable users to conceptualize and create new contexts--in which they discover, interpret, and represent relationships, by composing readymade and self-made content elements. The strategies are Collect, Assemble, Shift Perspective, Sketch, Write, and Exhibit. We conducted a field study involving 1247 students over 4 semesters. We connect visual, quantitative, and experiential data to show how students engage with prior work through the free-form web curation strategies, system, and pedagogy. We develop implications for design of web curation systems and education. We coalesce a theory of free-form web curation, based on the strategies, emphasizing the roles of space and context.