The BBC Archive is a great example of how content curation has changed. When you look at it now, it appears to be a well organised vast collection of everything produced by the BBC, however, this wasn’t always the case. One of my favourite TV shows of all time, Doctor Who is a victim of poor content curation. Between the years of 1963; the show's inception; and 1969, 97 episodes have been fully lost. That's around 40 hours of one TV show just gone.
Due to the nature of how TV was treated in the 60s, it was fully accepted that you watch something once and that’s it gone forever. TV was disposable, leading to loads of recordings just being binned. Occasionally, a lost episode or two will turn up, or audio will be found, but by and large, we can accept that the 97 episodes will remain lost. Hopefully, with how valued content curation is now we won't be looking back in 60 years trying to find lost media, however, it is possible.
In the film Bladerunner 2049, a blackout occurs, wiping all servers everywhere. All content stored digitally is just gone. Now while I understand this is a fictional movie, there is something to worry about here. There’s such a shift toward cloud storage at the moment we have to ask ourselves; “What will happen if the clouds go away?”.
I think the physical backup of information is more important than ever, even if this is just offline storage. With the threat of cyber attacks always lurking, we really need to ask ourselves if we need to change how we curate our content.
One of the things mentioned in this week's lecture which I wanted to look into more was the concept of content tagging. Content tagging refers to certain keywords that are relevant to the webpage which are held in the metadata, and are crucial to content curation. This interested me for a few reasons; 1 - it sounded boring but also incredibly important; 2 - it sounded menial but also quite complex; and 3 - I accidentally attended a talk about the very topic.
Basically, content tagging is essential for any search engine to function properly and is the reason things like Google Search work the way they do. While tagging content information like the page title, viewport, and technical information, it’s also important to include tags related to the topic of your content, so that users can find it.
What really interested me about content tagging was how this is a great example of how AI can be used. I went to Digital DNA Belfast earlier this year and somewhat accidentally ended up listening to a talk about this. AI is going to change the way content curation and specifically content tagging is done as it’s able to identify the key tags without bias or error. If a tagger misses one thing from the tags it could result in a whole group of users never reaching that content.
The idea of content tagging and how it’s going to change is really interesting to me as I think it’s so important to properly archive media, especially today due to how fast content comes and goes.
10 Most Important Meta Tags You Need to Know for SEO
Visual Grammar is the basically the way visual design is perceived and is an important part of Content Design. Visual Grammar should try to reflect and respect the content to provide a good user experience. While it seems like such a basic concept, it is incredibly important to always consider in what way you present content. This relates back to ideas of point, line, and plane from last year, as these are the essentials of visual grammar. To remind myself of the essentials of visual grammar, I had a look at Christian Leborg’s “Visual Grammar”. While I knew a lot of the concepts already, what was useful here was thinking about them again but with the context of using it within content design. Last year, I had considered the abstract idea of visual grammar alone, but know reading this, I feel I’ve started to realise more about how this relates to UX design.
While reading this book hasn’t been an earth shattering awaking for me, I think looking at think like this now really helps to remind me of the essential basics of visual design. When I had picked this book up I wasn’t sure if I was going to write about due not knowing what to say, but I think what been really useful here is connecting the basics of what we did last year with the more technical things we’re doing this year, and hopefully this will help to strengthen my designs and improve my visual grammar skills.
