I’m lucky to be teaching a class about digital curation for undergraduate information studies students this semester. I struggled a bit over the summer with how to structure the class. Of course it is important to focus on the concepts and theories of digital curation. But I think it’s also important to provide practical exercises that make those concepts concrete. I didn’t want to privilege either approach. A sociotechnical framing of information studies has been extremely important in my own research, but asking undergraduates to dive into the STS literature is asking for a lot I think. I want to whet their appetite for STS approaches (maybe they will take a senior seminar or go on to grad school). But I also want to give them some useful knowledge and skills that they can use in their current and future work.
