Themes Versus Curations: What's the Difference?

The Doe organizes its stories in a few ways. Let’s dive into the distinctions.

Curations, collections, themes, oh my!

You may have noticed we’ve made some changes to our explore page. So what’s it all about?

As I’ve outlined before, our original themes operate much like sections in a newspaper. Once we were comfortable with the breadth of what they covered, we decided to cement them into place and move on to categorizing every new narrative into a theme or two (or three).

Since our themes are set for now, we moved into curations mode.

The Doe is rolling out brand spankin’ new curations at least once a month. So how do we pick them? Sometimes, they’re timely, like our Best of 2021 curation. Or sometimes they’re just a fun, solid (we hope) idea re: NSFW.

We think you’ll find our curations to be a little more niche and nuanced than our themes, which encompass broader categories like women, justice and sex. And let me stop you right there. Yes, a narrative can live in both a curation and a theme! Phew. Get it? OK, maybe not, but long story short, these are simply ways of grouping stories into categories that we think will make it easier for you—the reader—to find the content you want on our site.

Now that you’ve clearly got it, I’ll throw one more wrench in there. Both curations and themes are types of collections. Which, ya know, makes sense as they are collecting material into specific groups. 

So we hope you dive in, whether it’s for a killer theme—give nostalgia, athletics or education a whirl—or for a rad curation like Black Voices or New Beginnings. They’re all right here on the explore page, so go ahead and do some ‘sploring.