Data Curation Can Learn From Art Curation

Many organizations that jumped on the data bandwagon a few years ago find themselves nowadays having to deal with a big amount of data that was accumulated overtime cluttered among data silos within the organization not knowing where to find some parts of it. Moreover, some of today’s data-driven organizations are still struggling with the question of how to transform their siloed data into valuable insights exactly because of the same reason, which is in other words, a lack of navigation capabilities among these data silos.

In response to this problem we see a new discipline called “data curation” starting to emerge in order to put some structure in organizations that are not even aware of some of their hidden data. In the age of “everyone is a curator in the digital world” from online community managers who curate content for the companies they work for all the way to independent YouTube personas and Instagram influencers who curate their own profiles, it’s not surprising to see that another digital field, the broader field of data professionals, joining the curating crowd. After all, how can a company leverage data without knowing what kind of data it owns? In addition, we, humans, appreciate structure and there are multiple examples of it all around us: streets have names and numbers, libraries order their books in an alphabetic order, and maps help us navigate our way around countries and continents by visualizing the space for us.

While some people may think of library sciences when hearing the words “data” and “curation” altogether, I wanted to go to the source and understand what the emerging world of data curation can learn from the world where this field is already established – art curation. I used the book “Ways of Curating” by one of the most famous art curators in the world, Hans Ulrich Obrist, as a reference, and I could come up with several questions that leaders of data operations, especially CDOs, and CIOs should ask themselves:

1. The person in charge of data curation – the mid 19^th century marks the time when artists who criticized the academy in France started curating their own exhibitions taking more active role in connecting directly with audiences. We can think about an equivalent period in the digital world around the 1990s when the internet gained popularity and technologies such as the data warehouse were invented and enabled bringing insights from data to life much faster than before. However, with more and more old artwork needing care so that it could be displayed longer in museums, as well as new artwork that needs new space for exhibition, a specialized field of art curation came to be, even though some small independent artists may still curate their exhibitions. In a world where massive amounts of data are generated every minute, we need to ask ourselves if the responsibility for data curation can support a brand new type of position in the same way it happened in the art world, or should it be delegated to positions that already exist such as data governance managers? In order to decide on the best course of action organizations must ask themselves how siloed their data are, and if that job should be kicked-off by external consultants or full-time employees based on the skillset needed. That leads us to the second question.
2. Skillset – Hans Ulrich Obrist co-curated some of his most interesting exhibitions using his interdisciplinary knowledge beyond art that he acquired from his mentors. An example of a cool exhibition he describes in his book is the “Laboratorium” where the artist studio is compared to the scientist’s lab.
   What can we learn from this about who could be a data curator? A person holding an information management degree who could come and start creating a data inventory right away? Or maybe a person who has product management experience who could treat the whole process as a digital product? There is no right or wrong answer. What should be considered, is if the person has a broad and interdisciplinary vision for the process or not, because it involves many little moving parts that require some understanding for the process to succeed. Technology and business are the more obvious areas that require fluency, but it never hurts to understand some UX/UI design to ensure easy access to the data catalog and maximize its value, as well as some legal implications and limitations, especially if third-party data is involved.
3. Responsibility – The verb curate comes from the Latin verb curare that means “to take care”. In the Roman Empire’s time, curators were more like our modern genitors or technicians, taking care of public works such as aqueducts, bathhouses, and sewers. Only in the 18^th century the word curator referred to a person taking care of a museum’s collection, and nowadays art curation is mostly about picking the right type of artwork for an exhibition and displaying it nicely. Hans Ulrich Obrist sees art curators as people responsible for “bridging gaps and building bridges between artists, the public, institutions, and other types of communities”. We can look at the equivalent of this evolution in the digital world and see how database administrators only cared about the maintenance of databases (e.g. updating rows and tables, make sure they are up and running, etc.) and only now we start hearing people talking about data cataloging, and even selection of external data to complement existing data inventories in order to bridge the gap between IT and the business. Will curators oversee both maintaining databases, and meta-data all at once? Some software products such as Alation, Informatica, and Collibra can already automate some of the meta-data process, but the overall understanding of how to maximize an entire organization’s data, building use-cases, and acquiring third-party data are still tasks that will always require humans, and the question is which of these responsibilities will fall into a data curator’s responsibility and which of these will be shared with other professionals.

To sum up, If we look at data curators as the professionals who help people across the organization realize new projects by allowing access to new data and ideas the same way Hans Ulrich Obrist sees art curators as the ones “helping artists realize their unrealized projects” we might be able to start answering these questions and even more.