There are many ways that stories can be curated. The method you decide on will likely be driven by the purpose of your project and consideration of some of the issues raised in the previous sections. On this page, we provide some guidance on potential approaches to curation and present some questions to help guide how you approach editing, storing and formatting your story collection.
How will you approach the curation of your story collection?
The curation of stories is usually carried out prior to them being displayed or developed into a creative output. This may involve reducing the number of stories to fit a particular purpose (such as preparing for an exhibition) or identifying key themes to tell a wider narrative and represent key issues. You may also want to edit stories to show connections or may decide to remove stories that are outliers.
Additionally, your audience and intended output will impact how you format your stories, and this may require you to change the way they are currently presented. For instance, you may be formatting stories in preparation for a podcast episode and need to change the format from written to audio.
To help with this process we have provided some top tips and resources on story curation. However, at this point you may want to ask some basic questions .
Questions to answer
- How many stories do I want to take forward from this collection?
- What are the important themes across the stories that you want to make prominent in your collection?
- How long do you want your stories to be?
- How do the stories relate – are there any outliers?
- What format do your stories need to be in?
How will you store the stories? In what format?
Regardless of the intended output for your story, it is likely that you will need to store your stories before and after curation. It can be helpful to think about how you will store stories in advance to ensure you have the required resources and can manage access. If you are editing stories, tracking these changes can also be important and will help you to address concerns related to copyright and permissions.
In addition, when stories are stored it is important that they are identifiable and searchable. This can help with your own process as you curate and develop outputs from your story collection, and it can also be useful for developing sustainable and accessible resources for future use (if this is your intended purpose). As such, when choosing methods and formats of archiving and storing stories, it is important to make physical and digital accessibility considerations.
Questions to answer
- Where will you store stories and who will have access?
- Do you need to track changes during curation? How will you access previous versions?
- Who do you want to be able to access your story collection?
- Have you considered accessibility to ensure anyone who needs to access it and use your collection is able to?
Further reading
#Meta data
We suggest considering the metadata that you will attach to your story collection as you collect stories and curate them. Meta data is the basic data that describes and explains the data set (in this case your story collection). It may include information such as date collected, location, author, theme or context of the story. At this stage, we are concerned with the story collection before it is made publicly available via an output, however, thinking about metadata can also be helpful if you intend to publish your stories on a digital platform.
Questions to answer
- Are the stories in your collection identifiable and searchable?
- What metadata will you attach to your story collection?