“Documenting the Now” has two main goals that helped serve the projects audience of Twitter activists and researchers
Goal 1
The first of which is the preservation of social justice movements through the archiving of tweets. As much of our current history is being created online in places that are controlled by platform owners, it became clear to the team that a way to preserve our online history was needed. “Documenting the Now” also realizes that there is a demand across academia in full for the preservation of online content. The project therefore aimed to create tools that aid in the collection and preservation of this data.
This also directly lines up with the digital humanities goal of preserving cultural data as “Documenting the Now” provides a database and tools to archive the historical movements that take place online through tweets (note to self: be more specific about the black lives matter movement here because obviously it is not taking place just online).
Goal 2
The secondary goal of this project was to create a tweet archival system that ethically supports the communities it studies. When the “Documenting the Now” team initially came out with their idea many people within the black lives matter movement as well as outside it pointed out that there is a danger in storing and providing data on communities and movements that can be linked back to specific people (hyperlink melon). One example of this lies in the fact that data firms that helped supply information to authorities about online movements would often reach out to the team asking for data. At first it would be under the guise of doing research but after some digging the team found that their job to was to turn that information over to authorities for social monitoring purposes (hyperlink white pages). To make sure that the data preservation being done did not harm the communities that “Documenting the Now” was actively trying to protect, it became a goal to create a system that would allow the data to stay in the hands of those communities and to flush out as many bad actors as possible. (shorten this)
This relates back to the digital humanities goals of protecting and publishing cultural data. “Documenting the Now” realized that there is a need for preserving the history of social movements like Black Lives Matter and have taken it upon themselves to find a balance between that and protecting the communities they serve.