Digital project

Documenting the Now is a project created after protests were rising in 2014. Co-Principal Investigators Dr. Meredith Clark, Bergis Jules, Ed Summers, community manager, Zakiya Collier, UX and Web Designer, Alexandera Dolan-Mescal, and DevOps Engineer, Francis Kayiwa, understood the importance of keeping digital history therefore created the project in 2016 help preserve it. According to a blog post from medium DocNow is

a web application for collecting Twitter data and obtaining consent from content creators

DocNow also has support groups, work shops, and online community which all discuss and teach activists the importance and how to document their work and opinion. The project responds to the use of social media for historically significant events as well as demand from scholars seeking and preserving digital content. Unfortunately after Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 the changes made in API have resulted in the dismantling of DocNow’s tools. Causing it to no longer working and useless.

The Team

Co-Principal Investigators: Dr. Meredith Clark, Bergis Jules, Ed Summers

Community Manager: Zakiya Collier

Web Designer: Alexandera Dolan-Mescal

DevOps Engineer: Francis Kayiwa

Research Goals

This project was used to help save and preserve media. Some research goals include involve communities, Social Media Archiving, create different tools, and to preserve key events.

Research Questions

Doc Now explores different questions. The project wants to know, how should have access to archived social media data? How does society want their digital presence to be remembered? And finally, what tools be designed to support archiving social media data?

Image below is of one of the three meetings where they discuss issues and social media and web archiving.