{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","title":"Curation in the Age of Platform Capitalism  The Value of Selection, Narration, and Expertise in New Media Cultures","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781032023007","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","id":"d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","uuid":"d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","title":"Curation in the Age of Platform Capitalism  The Value of Selection, Narration, and Expertise in New Media Cultures","normalized_title":"curationintheageofplatformcapitalismthevalueofselectionnarrationandexpertiseinnewmediacultures","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781032023007","isbns":["9781032023007","9781032023014","9781003182801"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":177,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Curation%20in%20the%20Age%20of%20Platform%20Capitalism%20%20The%20Value%20of%20Selection%2C%20Narration%2C%20and%20Expertise%20in%20New%20Media%20Cultures","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/d1c31cd8-6afd-4ea5-b7b0-085c26a4e406/search"},"page":{"printed_page":16,"pdf_page":26,"physical_index":26,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"743382c58dd9fb19aae8c451f6990b99e55675af34d620646f496c5bf2366de2"},"chapter":"CURATION IN THE AGE OF PLATFORM CAPITALISM","content":"1.3 Methods and Perspectives\n\nThe concept of curation, as stated above, is used to codify the behaviors, values, practices, and meanings around platform cultures as well as to draw attention and initiate a larger discussion around adjacent postures and rituals. Therefore, I set out to investigate a difused and necessarily open-ended phenomenon, one that can be adapted and modified by diverse agents in equally diverse contexts. Since difused curation is neither given in advance nor territorialized in a specific location, I had to reflexively construct the field of research, including the sites I would set out study. The methodological perspective I follow is multi-sited ethnography, a perspective which recognizes the decentralizing role of modern technologies in organizing social reality as well as the task of the researcher to trace the adaptation of these technologies across contexts of interaction (Marcus, 1995; Pink et al., 2015). Pertinently, George Marcus speaks about how cultural logics (such as curation),\n\nare always multiply produced, and any ethnographic account of these logics finds that they are at least partly constituted within sites of the socalled system (i.e., modern interlocking institutions of media, markets, states, industries, universities-the worlds of elites, experts, and middle classes).\n\n(1995: 97)\n\nTo understand these logics, in turn, the researcher develops strategies of “quite literally following connections, associations, and putative relationships” (1995: 97). I thus followed the logic of curation in its multiple manifestations by constructing the manifold and heterogeneous sites where it appeared as my research went along.\n\nI also employ what Karen O’ Reilly calls an “iterative-inductive” approach, which implies beginning the research process with as few presumptions as possible, allowing theoretical considerations to emerge in the course of research and employing a spiral research design where theory and the material inform each other in a mutually constitutive loop (2021). In this context, the diferent stages of research are not independent from each other, namely “data collection, analysis, and writing are not discrete phases but inextricably linked” (2021: 5). Theory in turn is at the same time a “precursor, medium and outcome” (2021: 29), that is, it helps initiating the study process, mediating between data and analysis and eventually being the end product of the inquiry. In this regard, I did not determine the problem-space in advance but inductively iteratively constructed it during the research process. While O’ Reilly and Marcus position themselves within an ethnographic context, Celia Lury proposes her similar “compositional methodology” as larger cultural theory method, where the phenomenon that is being studied “becomes a problem as it is investigated” rather than being predetermined (2021: 2). For Lury, this research design is pertinent for investigating phenomena that take shape in and across platforms (such as, in our case, platform curation), as platforms bring about changes in our “epistemic infrastructure”, including the ways that knowledge is produced and distributed (2021: 113–115). The constant remixability and recursivity of knowledge claims which are accentuated by platforms, according to Lury, exposes sites of knowledge to uncertainty: platforms “mutate the topologies of knowledge of problem spaces”; they tend to modify the phenomena they convey and in turn transform the problem-space associated with these phenomena (2021: 13). Compositional methodology then takes into consideration this changeable condition vis-à-vis the main components of research design, what she calls the “givens” (a priori assumptions), the “goals” (research aims) and the “operators” (theory and method), regarding them as open to transformation (2021: 3). In my case, the given was that curation, as a concept and a logic, has sprawled in the last decade as a form of value-adding from the artworld to the online economies. The goal was to explore what this sprawling does—in the anthropological sense—in wider cultural landscapes. The operators of critical cultural and media theory and multi-sited digital ethnography led me to focus on platforms as principal sites where this sprawling takes place. Thus, the operators were in constant dialogue with the givens and goals. This relatively elastic relationship between the givens and goals and the operators helped to maintain an open-ended problem-space that could be re-examined as theory and the research material shaped each other.\n\n16\n\nHomo Curatorius","previous_page":15,"next_page":17}