Goals

According to Documenting the Now the goal is

To develop tools and cultivate a community of practice for collecting social media.

Chris Freeland, project co-principal investigator also says

The DocNow application will provide scholars with new ways of gathering and analyzing data from Twitter, which is a tremendous source of documentation on contemporary events.

This goal is similar to the Digital humanities goal which is to save and analyze culture on social media as a way to record and show history. Mainly focusing on how people represent themselves share beliefs, and influence one another.

Both goals of media focused communication and digital humanities are trying to understand how media affects and shapes society. They also both aim to reveal different opinions and keep them as history and as a way to show change.