Social media has granted us the ability to converse with people anywhere at any time and is a crucial tool for exercising freedom of speech. It is because of these benefits online platforms have become places where social movements take flight.
However, unlike physical media, it is not easy to store the history of movements that take place on these platforms. “Documenting the Now“, which ran from 2016 to 2023, aimed to help solve this problem by creating a tool that archives history through the preservation of Tweets.
The goal and original scope of this project was originally to document the Black Lives Matter movement after the police killing of Michael Brown who was a black teenager from Ferguson, Missouri. However, the tools created can be applicable to any group or movement.
But what makes these tools different from other methods of Twitter data collection is that they put a focus on consent and privacy. Not only did “Documenting the Now” have a system in place that automatically alerted people as to the collection of their tweets but twitter users could also remove their tweets from data sets at any time.
The researchers and activists who used these tools also benefited from this community first mindset as well. The project team kept their users involved with the process of creating the project by keeping an open dialogue. A forum was started so that the team could receive and implement live feedback and there is also a GitHub to keep things open source.
“Documenting the Now” is significant to the field social media because it created a way for people to look back at a snapshot of an ever changing medium through the ethical collection and preservation of tweets. “Documenting the now” also functioned as an excellent example of a digital humanities project as it directly used digital tools to help aid in the preservation of human culture.
The team behind the project consists of Bergis Jules, Edward Summers, Dr. Meredith Clark, Zakiya Collier, Alexander Dolan-Mescal, and Francis Kayiwa. “Documenting the Now”. The project also received funding from the Melon Foundation and the Princeton University Library. The project took place across America but Bergis Jules and Edward Summers (the project leads) are based out of University of California Riverside and University of Maryland respectively.