Story vs History and the curation tools to record them!
Not all curation tools are the same. Some are built to tell a story, and some are built to record history.
In this post, I explore the difference between storytelling and recording history and explain how our topic curation tool is ideal for recording history.
We will also discuss an innovative way to share history using chatbots.
The process of a Story
A story is subjective and has a beginning, middle, and end.
In a story, we have one or more protagonists and follow their development.
Stories are integral to the experience.
Story curation tools, therefore, are designed to record a narrative.
These tools make it easy to take snippets of content from across the web in various formats like tweets, images, excerpts of content from other sources, etc., and weave it into a story.
Story curation tools let you easily build a new narrative by collecting and sharing information in a stream.
To see a list of storytelling curation tools click here.
The process of History
A history, on the other hand, is defined as knowledge acquired by investigation.
The protagonist in history is the person telling the history.
It’s their research and objectivity that enables us to learn from past events.
History is differential, as its understanding depends on circumstances and relevant factors.
We remember an experience and behold history.
Here is how Wikipedia describes history as:
History (from Greek ἱστορία, historia, meaning “inquiry, knowledge acquired by investigation”) is the study of the past as it is described in written documents.
It is an umbrella term that relates to past events as well as the memory, discovery, collection, organization, presentation, and interpretation of information about these events. Scholars who write about history are called historians.
In essence, historians are researchers, that document events in order to help us understand and learn from the past.
When recording the history of an event, it is important for the researchers to manage the chronology, sources and provide insight and commentary to help us understand the context.
There are two types of historians. Those who write about the past, and those who are present and record history as it happens.
Thucydides for example is known as the father of scientific history who recorded the history of the Peloponnesian War as he participated in the war as a general.
It is said that he applied strict standards of impartiality and evidence-gathering and analysis of cause and effect, without reference to intervention by the deities.
Our tools are designed to let you reference events, record your objective comments, and add important meta information to help with analysis of the history.
Recording our activities and experience gives us an objective look into our past and will be a source of discovery.
Whether we are recording history as we experience it, or we are investigating some past history, we need the right tools to record our research.
We have developed a set of solutions for both recording history and sharing it.
I recommend you get in the habit of saving the history of events that interest you, it always comes in handy.
Our tools make it really easy to do so. Let’s take a look.
Curation Tools to record History
We offer two solutions that together let us curate and share our research.
The first tool is Kurator. A browser tool that makes it easy to save, comment, and tag the information we store. You can learn about Kurator features here.
We publish our curated research into KBucket libraries.
Each post in a KBucket library has a title, image, headline, summary, date, publisher, author, and content tags.
The categorization of our research allows us to quickly index the content in context.
Being able to index the data quickly is an important feature of investigating history.
In other words, meta-information is critical to the recording of history.
Here is a recorded history of the COVID19 pandemic.
The same data stored on a KBucket page can also be presented via a conversational chatbot interface.
Let’s take a look.
A conversational UI for sharing History
We have developed a powerful solution for accessing history via a conversational chatbot UI.
We are using our topic curation portals as a CMS solution for conversational chatbots.
This makes it really easy to access the information from any interface and use both voice and text to access the information.
The meta-information make it possible for people to ask time, or person related questions.
The content is organized in categories to give is a development narrative of the events.
Here are some examples to help you see the value of our tools.
I have curated various articles related to the COVID19 pandemic.
In essence, the COVID19 chatbot records the history of events in the context of time.
The history of this pandemic includes topics like infection data, symptoms, lockdown, reopening, risks, and other related topics.
The most important events are curated from trusted sources and shared vis the COVID19 chatbot.
To learn about how we use KBucket as a CMS for chatbots go here.
To learn how to use curation for Project Management go here.