If Frankenstien had curated?

Picture the scene.......Dr Frankenstein is in the lab, bringing the very SPARK !!! of life to his Monster. He hooks up all the relevant cables and with the twist of a dial bubbles gloop up through a series of giant beakers. Bursts of electricity growl out of a giant van de graaff machine and he gestures to Igor to flick the switch. The final surge of electricity pulses over the monsters hand stitched body.....He's alive.....!! ALIVE !!!!!.............now before the monster can sit up, in walks Dr Frankenstiens accountant. You see.....old Frankie boy has been racking up one heck of an electricity bill of late.....then there is overtime payments and health insurance for Igor, the upkeep of his lab and not forgetting his P.R agency fees.

Accountant- "Dr Frankenstein, this obsession with creation can't go on. In order to maintain your standard of living you need to consider a new strategy. have you ever considered Curation over Creation?"

At this point Frankie (real name Victor) recalled a conversation he was having at a recent mad scientist convention where all the talk was about content over creation and he pondered over why you couldn't have both.....and if indeed they were not one in the same so in order to allay the fears of his account there was only one thing he could say....

Frankie - said "relax"

He needed more time to work on his project but agreed that perhaps some parts of his experiments could be aided by sourcing information, material and the odd formula from other like minded crazy professors but where would he start to look?

First port of call for most people these days is of course the good old internet, but tread carefully as Mitchell Kapor would say as this is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant. The wide web of wordly information is a fabulous place but you should plan and be strategic about what you need, when you need it, how you will use it or how you will support it. A random search for "making life like frankenstein" takes about 0.4 of a second to come up with 6,280,000 hits but Frankie is easily distracted and gets lost in a recipe for monster marshmallow pops........he could be there for hours. However, had Frankie focussed his search on "electricity and the human body" he would have eventually came across articles about the work of Luigi Galvani which he could have used to great effect rather than investing heavily in his own set of tests......alternatively he could have just rubbed a balloon on Igors head and watched the static flow. 

Mary Shelly was curating a number of theories and ideas of the time and put them together. You have Galvanism from Galvanis work, references from Paradise Lost by John Milton and elements of influence from Humphry Davys Elements of Chemical Philosophy. All of these combined to create the novel which in itself has been curated by others, turned twisted and fed a whole new generation of stories. 

So Curation isn't new. We are maybe led to believe it is but like many things it is really just a buzz word and  way of of bringing content together in a place that allows us to source it and then display it or comment on it in a chosen format. We even have a number of  tools available that have been created to produce and release content for like minded people or those with a passing interest. In fact if you think about it these lend more to Frankenstein than we could imagine. Take Flipboard, Scoop it and Paper.li, are they not Curation tools created to stitch a range of content from various sources together then bring it all back to life?

That Learning Dude @LearningXDude