Digital curation and the networked audience of urban events

Abstract

The proliferation of portable, networked and location-aware devices has drastically changed how the city is represented and interpreted in general and during specific events in particular by enabling new practices of digital curation and networked audience activities. These extend the urban realm from the physical into the virtual, which provides a space for global and dispersed, often naive audience activities. This article uses the case study of the Fiesta de Santo Tomás, which is an annual festival that takes place during the week leading up to Christmas in Chichicastenango, Guatemala, to illustrate how digital curation, (re)presentation and (re)interpretation of festive events occur in a hybrid urban space. By documenting the ways that the modern day version of this festival has made its way into the larger digitally mediated sphere of urbanism, the study looks at three groups of curators and how their ways of encoding the event provide a multiplicity of representations to be decoded by the members of the ephemeral networked audience.