Digital Curation in the postmodern social perspective: curatorial facets, concepts and participatory techniques

Abstract: Information and Communication Technologies transform the spaces for presenting cultural heritage information and communication from brick-and-mortar spaces into hybrid environments: both on-site and digital-virtual. This transformation demands a more specific Digital Curation on the Web 2.0 context, platform on which participatory approaches emerge in the curatorial process, such as Social, Collective and Citizen Curations, which use crowdsourcing and storytelling. In this scenario, this article questions the difference between Digital Curation and other participatory curations which have emerged in postmodernity. The objective was to explore the Digital Curation facets in the participatory approach in the scope of Information Science. The scientific relevance of the paper was justified by the need for stakeholders’ participation in the curation of cultural contents and the necessary approach by Information Science. The methodology was qualitative in nature, theoretical and exploratory. The theoretical research was carried out on the proposed themes, and their similarities and differences were explored. Digital Curation expands by presenting new curatorial facets - Social, Citizen and Collective -, which present different levels of social involvement and can converge with each other, according to the objective of the proposed curation project. Crowdsourcing and storytelling techniques are used for the curatorial process with a participatory approach.


Introduction
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) transformed libraries, archives and museums into hybrid cultural spaces, acting simultaneously on-site and on digital environments.The emergence of Web 2.0 transmuted static pages into dynamic interfaces and supported societal participation, previously just consumer of information, and now a collective digital content producer.As a result, the means of accessing information were expanded and its sharing was also made possible.
Progressively, such transformations demanded a Digital Curation (DC) to ensure access and preservation for present and future generations.Creating digital representations of cultural heritage has become fundamental for cultural spaces that reflect environmental, social, economic and health changes.In this scenario, digital interfaces have become means of accessing artifacts held in the on-site spaces of libraries, archives and museums.
The DC, responsible for creating digital representations, is a conceptual and technical process defined as "the management and preservation of digital data/information over the long-term" (Digital Curation Center, 2004).Based on the Digital Curation Life Cycle Model (Higgins, 2008), structural and practical actions are planned to be developed before, during and after the curatorial process of digital or digitized objects.
On the other hand, stakeholders' participation and collaboration in cultural facilities have changed their nature, giving them a "[…] responsive, collaborative and multivocal, resulting in leadership from a complex web of stakeholders with diverse expertise" (Pegno;Brindza, 2021, p. 343).
Such a movement can be seen as stakeholders' active participation in hybrid spaces, encouraging cultural heritage appropriation and making the community aware of the need to activate their voices and narratives.It is a horizontal construction of identity social memory and its preservation for future generations.Consequently, despite contextual variations, Social Curation, Collective Curation, Citizen Curation, crowdsourcing and storytelling have become terms used in participatory practices in curatorial processes.
In this context, this study questions the differences between these participatory curations that emerged in the post-custodial paradigm and, thus, the objective of this article was to explore such facets in the dialogic and interdisciplinary scope of Information Science (IC).

Methodological Procedures
In this perspective, the presented study becomes relevant given the possibility of social empowerment on the Web multiple environments.Scientific studies on the subject have not been documented in the literature, and the need for conceptual and practical discussions that progressively shape hybrid cultural equipment -libraries, archives and museums are deemed necessary.
The methodology was qualitative, theoretical and exploratory, in which a survey was carried out on the paradigms of IS, the Web 2.0 transformations and the insertion of the participatory approach in cultural facilities.Subsequently, definitions of Digital Curation, Social Curation, Collective Curation, Citizen Curation, Crowdsourcing and Storytelling were sought.Data was collected in Portuguese, English and Spanish for the last ten years of publication in the Brapci, Scopus, Oasis and Google Scholar databases, from December 2021 to January 2022.

The post-custodial paradigm and participatory approaches
Postmodernity has given rise to new ways of approaching cultural heritage, such as multivocality and social engagement that favor the cultural enrichment of society.For Cook (2001, p. 17), postmodernism "seeks to emphasize the diversity of human experience by recovering marginalized voices in the face of such hegemony and, hence its emphasis across a whole range of academic disciplines on issues of gender, race, class, sexuality and locality".
The hegemony mentioned by the author occurred in modernism, which sought, from discourses constructed by dominant classes, inside and outside cultural facilities, homogenization and social leveling (Cook, 2001).This hegemony was responsible for the disappearance of other narratives and cultural differences -such as female voices hidden for a long time in Western culture, an artificial construction of discourses aimed at reinforcing male power in society (Cook, 2001).These discourses' control results from culture's ability to lead to social transformation.Modernism proposed rationalist and linear metanarratives offered to society, individually and collectively, a truncated view of human nature (Cook, 2001).
Rationality and the production of objective knowledge prevailed, disregarding the subjective aspects existing in society.In this scenario, IS emerged as an interdisciplinary area, which was transformed from the custodial, historicist, patrimonial and technicist (Ribeiro, 2011, p. 62) paradigm, modern, by adopting the informational, scientific and post-custodial (Ribeiro, 2011, p. 62), postmodern.
The first model can be divided into two phases: one, syncretic and custodial, which emphasized memory as a legitimizing source of the Nation-State and culture as a reinforcement of its identity; and the other, technical and still custodial, marked by the scientific and technological revolutions, where one begins to think about the importance of document management (Ribeiro, 2011).
The technical activities focused on the preservation and storage of informational objects in cultural spaces (Santos, 2018), which did not benefit the informational subject, since they focused on the collection and not on the community's needs, as they did not contemplate information access.Information is the most significant aspect in the post-custodial paradigm (Santos, 2018).Cook (2001) states that postmodernists seek to denaturalize phenomena, accepted in society as normal, natural, rational, by following a vision of patriarchy, capitalism or the western canon of great literature, which need deconstruction and reformulation to better reflect the diversity today.
In this sense, the deconstruction of metanarratives in cultural facilities depends on "citizen consciousness"2 to address multiculturalism and the construction of new narratives about discourses kept and preserved in these facilities whose discovery becomes possible only with information access.
ICTs have created hybrid, digital-virtual cultural facilities, and new forms of interaction with the available artifacts.In this context, stakeholders are encouraged to "[…] engage actively in the interpretation, manipulation, appreciation and co-creation of cultural content" (Riches Resources, 2014, p. 315).Web 2.0, which essentially modified the forms of interaction on digital environments, offered two different moments regarding information sharing: if Web 1.0 was centered on its unilateral transmission with total control of content production by the specialists, considering the subject of the interaction as a mere user (Jorente et al., 2016), the second phase of the Web enabled the production of content and information formats from a many-to-many perspective.
Web 2.0 presents interaction as its main feature and allows content to be produced by netizens horizontally and collaboratively (Jorente et al., 2016).On Web 2.0, platforms and social media are fundamental elements, providing access, sharing, co-creation and social interaction across communities (Riches Resources, 2014).
Great allies of cultural facilities for enabling cultural heritage access and sharing allow stakeholder collaboration through comments, co-creation, modification and content creation, and cultural values implicit in the recreated conversational dialogic relationships.
Part of the cultural system, such values are "essential elements of cultural identity, a factor of distinction from different cultures, and a source of social cohesion when they are shared amidst members of the same culture, or there is reciprocal respect when more than one culture is involved" (Riches Resources, 2014, p. 321).Incorporated into cultural goods, both tangible and intangible, they represent the society's memory and cultural heritage.
In this scenario, cultural facilities are challenged to a DC representing communities and their values on digital environments.The DC must understand the artifact digital representations arising from the production of digital objects already consolidated by the institutional culture and others, not yet institutionalized, such as those produced by netizens and not yet assimilated, and the re-readings of institutional and official narratives to be carried out by stakeholders.
According to Cook (2001, p. 23) there is a "[…] growing awareness of other voices, other stories, other narratives, other realities -other than those that traditionally have filled school readers, history books, museums, public monuments, popular media and archives", which can be shared thanks to ICT on Web 2.0 interfaces.
To this end, we must expand the DC facets from the methodologies, techniques and strategies used for these other curatorial forms -Collective, Social and Citizen -aimed at a participatory approach.

Digital, collective, social and citizen: a comprehensive curation
Born in museum spaces, curatorial practices have been present since the 14th century have undergone significant conceptual changes influenced by the emergence of ICT and interdisciplinary studies, such as Information Science, Computer Science, Digital Humanities, etc. (Sabharwal, 2015).The introduction of new digital formats, devices and methods in information production and the need to give access to digital objects required the expansion of concepts and understanding of new curation methods for preservation and access on the digital environment.
The term DC emerges in the context of ICT with interdisciplinary and inter-institutional characteristics, requiring skills beyond pre-digital curatorial practices and knowledge of technologies applicable to DC from new hybridized information professionals (Sabharwal, 2015).
From the awareness of this need, 2011 the Digital Curation Center (DCC) was created -a distributed collaborative service center focused on discussions on political and technological issues and processes for curation, preservation and the need to understand the curation process (Higgins, 2011).
In 2007, Sarah Higgins proposed the currently accepted Curation Life Cycle Model.The model presents an overview of the actions to be carried out in curating digital or digitized objects, through a systematized strategy of sequential practices.Actions can "[…] ensure the maintenance of authenticity, reliability, integrity and usability of digital material" (Higgins, 2008, p. 135).The process begins with designing and strategically planning macro, micro and occasional actions, as shown in Figure 1.Macro actions must be planned and defined before the curatorial process of the digital or digitized object for its preservation and long-term access.The actions to be planned are: description and representation of information; preservation planning; community watch and participation (Higgins, 2008).
On the other hand, the micro actions are practical activities carried out during the cyclical curation process, by the planning established in the macro actions.They are: creation and reception; appraisal and selection; ingestion; preservation action; storage; access, use and reuse; and transformation.Notably, occasional actions, which are reappraisal, possible disposals, and migration are also part of the DC cyclical process (Higgins, 2008).
In addition, new participatory approaches that expand the role of the DC have recently emerged: Collective, Social and Citizen Curations.Social Curation is understood by Sabharwal (2015, p. 11) as a process that "[…] involves community and public feedback using various social media platforms; its aims is to add meaning to the collections and to enrich public discourse on collections or exhibition themes".Social media offer stakeholders freedom to act as content curators.Seitzinger (2014, p. 415) defines Social Curation as the "[...] discovery, selection, collection and sharing of digital artifacts by an individual for a social purpose, such as learning, collaboration, identity expression or community participation".
Social Curation is a complex process, involving multiple platforms and actions undertaken by informational subjects, individuals or communities, configured as curators, according to their preferences.The Social Curation practical actions are divided into four phases: discovery, selection, collection and sharing (Seitzinger, 2014).For the discovery of curatorial artifacts "[…] a curator must set up information streams and monitor these regularly, to come across artifacts to share" (Seitzinger, 2014, p. 415), which implies the configuration of these flows, their monitoring and their adjust, when necessary, by changing the parameters.
The "selection" phase copes with the co-curators' internal decisions to collect and/or share an artifact, according to their interests or contexts.The "collection" phase combines and inserts artifacts with common characteristics (Seitzinger, 2014).This is the first opportunity to add values to an object from grouping of artifacts with a contextual perspective (Seitzinger, 2014).Moreover, tagging with specific words, adding comments, or placing an artifact in a narrative structure among other artifacts are value-assigning actions.
In "sharing", the co-curator decides how to share and make collections available on their networks on social platforms.It is noteworthy that sharing is not limited to a single platform.Still, it is possible to share the same collection on multiple platforms (Seitzinger, 2014), which creates the opportunity to discover artifact representations on other platforms and subject contexts, " [...] while retaining the link and metadata that makes the original curator and their clusters findable" (Seitzinger, 2014, p. 416).
The definition and description of the Social Curation process demonstrated that access to information and cultural goods on digital environments is essential for stakeholders to carry out their curation (artifacts of their interest) on social platforms in a horizontal and peered manner.
In this sense, Social Curation highlights new values of cultural heritage in a collective perspective.It assists actions such as artifact appraisal, classification and description and gives rise to stakeholders' new cultural assets with identity values to be curated and institutionalized in the cultural facility.
In the same direction, is the Citizen Curation.In the context of the European project SPICE (Social Cohesion, Participation and Inclusion through Cultural Engagement), Daga et al. (2021, p. 2) define it as a: […] methodology for producing, collecting, interpreting, and archiving people's responses to cultural objects, with the aim of favouring the emergence of multiple, sometimes conflicting viewpoints, and motivating the users and memory institutions to reflect upon them.
Unlike the authors, Bolioli et al. (2021, p. 456) understand Citizen Curation as "[…] a process in which cultural objects are used as a resource by citizens to develop their interpretations".According to the authors, the term is not recent.It has been applied by different authors to describe and reflect on the interaction between netizens and cultural facilities in a context of participatory curation that allows stakeholders to also curate collections (Bolioli et al., 2021).
The term has been highlighted in the context of the SPICE program -Social cohesion, Participation, and Inclusion through Cultural Engagement -aimed at developing technologies that promote social engagement and allow stakeholders to share information about museum collections, through a collaborative platform.
The SPICE project is justified by the limitations of social media for developing participatory cultural activities.Also, heritage institutions can share digital objects online, track their provenance and reuse, access social media history, etc. (Daga et al., 2021).The program works with five different communities that need greater representativeness in preserving their cultural heritage (Social cohesion, Participation and Inclusion through Cultural Engagement, 2021): 1) Finland: "Bridge the distance" project.The project aims to enable remote interaction with museum collections.In this regard, the media department at Aalto University together with the Design Museum Helsinki created the Pop-up VR Museum.This traveling museum will be available online and will travel across the country.The Pop-up VR Museum holds workshops and collects community interpretations of the Design Museum Helsinki objects.
2) Ireland: "Share your view of art" project, developed through the IMMA Viewpoints platform.On the platform, netizens can interact and share their opinions about the IMMA (Ireland's National Cultural Institution for Modern and Contemporary Art) collection.
3) Spain: "How to save the animals with which we share the planet" project in partnership with the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid.The project consists of a treasure hunt developed in an application for mobile devices.The app's first version was tested at Science Week 2021 at the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid.4) Italy: "Tell us a story: interpret, interact, reflect" project.In partnership with the Galleria d' Arte Moderna (GAM), SPICE worked on the interface of an application to collect data on the community's interaction with the GAM collection.The app also began collecting stories created by stakeholders.5) Israel: "accepting other's opinions" project.The project is carried out in partnership with the Reuben and Edith Hecht Museum and a school, and consisted of developing an application to collect students' reflections about the museum's collection.SPICE conducts workshops and is in constant dialogue with teachers to analyze how interaction with the collection can promote reflection.
Citizen Curation differs from Social Curation by developing social engagement projects for a specific community, and working with technologies and techniques to create participatory activities.
The Collective Curation is "[...] part of a curation in which stakeholders are involved in decision-making processes, that is, in curatorial planning" (Batista;Jorente, 2021, p. 249).Fetterman et al. (2018) divide the degree of stakeholder involvement into three levels: collaborative, participatory and empowering.In the Collaborative degree, it is limited to a consultation with the stakeholders by the institutions in the search for information that guide the decision making and the activities to be developed (Ingles;Musch;Qwist-Hoffmann, 1999).For this, instruments such as questionnaires and the like are used.
In the Participative one "There is a horizontality in curatorial action planning in which the active individuals' decisions have the same weight as the institutional members' decisions" (Batista;Jorente, 2021, p. 249), the decisions are shared between institutions and the stakeholders.In the Empowering degree, stakeholders control decision making.The professionals help them, in a consulting relationship, to maintain the institutional characteristics and their responsibilities (Fetterman et al., 2018).
The Collective Curation differs from Social and Citizen Curation in defining the level of stakeholders' involvement in the curatorial processes.The choice of curation level depends on the profile of cultural facilities, policies, guidelines that govern these institutions, and the project to be developed.In practice, curation in this approach takes place through projects and activities such as crowdsourcing and storytelling.

Definitions and application contexts of crowdsourcing and storytelling
Free software development led to a transformation in the software industry, characterized by the concept of Open Source (Fernandes, 2012).Open Source (OS) refers to software whose source code can be executed, copied, shared and improved by netizens.The OS opened space for collaboration on digital environments, which contributed to the emergence of crowdsourcing (Fernandes, 2012).
The term crowdsourcing was created by Jeff Howe -American journalist and researcherin 2006 to characterize social participation and collaboration in problem solving and innovation (Chieh, 2019).Crowdsourcing names practices that use collective intelligence to produce innovations (Fernandes, 2012).Such practices are characterized by social participation and collaboration to solve problems in institutions, organizations and public or private companies.The main objective is to combine the collaboration of external sources with a given institution's internal knowledge to recognize that the answers to problems can come from different places and individuals (Chieh, 2019).
Crowdsourcing occurs on several Web 2.0 environments, from social platforms created specifically for this practice to social media, as Web 2.0 transforms netizens into prosumers 3consumers and content producers.Chieh (2019) highlights the promotion of social inclusion as a result of the manifestation of stakeholders' problem-solving skills for continuous learning, which motivates content production and sharing.It has four essential steps: 1) Identification: the organization identifies a problem or an activity that it cannot or does not want to develop internally; 2) Form of development: the conditions for the development of the activity are made available on a web platform and the netizens' participation is specified (deadlines, rewards, among others); 3) Netizens' contribution: informational subjects develop small parts of the activity or try to develop the activity as a whole; 4) Assessment: The organization assesses all contributions to solve the problem and delivers rewards (if (Fernandes, 2012).Fernandes (2012) and Chieh (2019) highlight the Crowdsourcing typologies, represented in Chart 1.The chart presents a synthesis of the multiple possibilities of Crowdsourcing application in the search for netizens' collaboration to solve problems and create knowledge.

Crowd wisdom
It is based on collective intelligence and uses the community to predict events, outcomes and problem solutions more accurately.

Crowd creation
Uses collective creativity; the community creates content collaboratively.

Crowd voting
Stakeholders express their opinion through voting or rating.

Crowdfunding
Collective funding; the community collaborates financially with various projects or causes.

Knowledge Discovery and Management
A community is challenged to find information on a given topic to expand the knowledge of an organization/institution on the topic in question.

Broadcast Search
An institution/organization is faced with an issue whose response was not found internally, and seeks the solution among netizens.Organizations often offer awards to netizens who solve the problem.

Peer-Vetted Creative Production
Opening of the design phase of a particular product or service to find/collect ideas among netizens to help in the creation process.

Distributed Human Intelligence Tasking
Type of crowdsourcing used to process large amounts of data or perform very complex tasks, which are divided into small tasks, developed collaboratively.
Storytelling, in turn, is a technique used to tell stories applied in several areas, such as marketing and education.Storytelling involves of structuring a narrative to bring the audience closer to the desired context (Maia;Furnival, 2020).The term, in English, means an act of telling or narrating stories; the date this technique was created is unknown as storytelling have accompanied human beings since before the development of writing (França;Brusamolin, 2021).
The narratives that make up Storytelling are oral or written accounts of one or more facts.The technique is applied as a communication resource between an institution and its stakeholders (internal and external) (França;Brusamolin, 2021).The use of narratives is contextually assessed, as the technique consists of conducting the narratives to reach the audience in the desired way.In this sense, the stories can be adapted and organized according to the context of application of the technique (França;Brusamolin, 2021).According to Coan and Silva (2018, p. 5) a narrative "[…] can be leveraged to engage, communicate, explain, persuade and stimulate the imagination for new ideas".
Crowdsourcing and Storytelling are methodologies and techniques of engagement and social empowerment to be considered in Collective, Social and Citizen Curation in hybrid cultural facilities.

Final Considerations
With the consolidation of Web 2.0, new forms of interaction between informational subjects and stakeholders emerged with the artifacts present in cultural facilities that give them a voice by allowing the construction of horizontal social narratives.Participatory approaches, provided by ICT on the Web 2.0, modified the curatorial processes, simultaneously promoting collective empowerment and the appropriation of artifacts in archives, libraries and museums.From effective access, culture is socialized and re-readings of social memory can be provided.
Information Science, when working the different dimensions of Digital, Collective, Social and Citizen Curation must turn to the social issues to be worked on in cultural facilities, which have become hybrid environments, between the on-site and the digital.The derived curatorial dimensions were presented in this work reflect on the used terminologies, their similarities and differences from the perspective of social participation in curatorial processes.
In the social approach, access to artifacts on multiple internet platforms is fundamental, which means opening up the collections to the various stakeholders.For the optimal access on digital interfaces, the artifacts presented and represented should undergo the DC.
The Social Curation transforms stakeholders into co-curators and demands attention from cultural facilities.Their collections are not necessarily made up of curated artifacts, but they have cultural values emerging from the communities, which lack proper DC for their preservation.
The Citizen Curation allows stakeholders to share their reinterpretations and interpretations of curated and accessible artifacts.Citizen Curation builds multiple narratives parallel to institutionalized narratives.It proposes cultural tolerance to the community based recognizing the multiple points of view, differences and cultural similarities existing in society.
The Collective Curation establishes the degree of stakeholders' involvement in the curatorial process.It happens in the DC macro actions and allows convergence with other curations, as they do not exclude each other, but complement each other in the participatory approach.
These participatory approaches prioritize social engagement and provide the stakeholders with the appropriation of artifacts to construct horizontal narratives and offer them a sense of belonging to cultural facilities.Thus, the DC expands by presenting new approaches that need the social perspective of Information Science to be worked on in the cultural facilities of libraries, archives and museums.