“Documenting the Now” helps to preserve online social justice movements like Black Lives Matter through tweet archival while keeping in mind ethical considerations for data privacy.
The project team understood the needs and challenges for the historical documentation of social movements not only from an archival perspective but also from the vantage point of putting the narrative of movements in the hands of activists. By creating user friendly and open source tools people have the ability to have the resources to tell the truths of their movements.
However, storing data on social movements is a double edged sword as the team behind “Documenting the Now” was initially met with critical concerns of ethics and privacy. Users were concerned about the project’s capability to collect mass amounts of vulnerable data that could be used for social monitoring by authorities and bad actors.
The Black Lives Matter movement is one that is unfortunately met with continuous pushback by people who are looking to push their own version of the status quo. While collecting data on this movement and on the black community there is still an importance of keeping snapshots of this data. The stories of people within this community and within all vulnerable communities will always be worth telling.
“Documenting the Now” played a pivotal role in helping to tell the stories of those who fell victim to police violence. The project was created after the murder of a black teenager in Ferguson Missouri named Michael Brown. His wrongful death sparked a wave of conversation and mobilization online and both Bergis (last name) and Edward Summers knew the importance of preserving this moment for others to be able to one day look back on.