Understanding personal digital collections: an interdisciplinary exploration

Once undertaken primarily by museum professionals, the activity of curatorship has been popularized via the Web. Social media tools, such as YouTube playlists and Pinterest Web bulletin boards, enable users to curate a diverse range of materials for personal use and for broader publication. But what makes one set of "curated" items more interesting than another? In this paper, we show how findings from an initial humanistic inquiry led to a lab-based user experiment, and how combined insights from these studies have illuminated new research streams in both humanistic and design research modes.