Doc Now is a project that aims to create open-source tools and community-centered practices that promote the ethical collecting, use, and preservation of publicly available content shared on the web and social media.
The project Documenting the Now was created in response to the public’s usage of social media to document historically significant events as well as demands from academics, students, and archivists looking for an easy way to gather and preserve this type of digital content.
The project Documenting the Now was created in response to the public’s usage of social media to document historically significant events as well as demands from academics, students, and archivists looking for an easy way to gather and preserve this type of digital content.
It is a Digital Humanities Project led by researchers and activists. It has had two phases. It was originally done by researchers at the University of Virginia when it was passed off to a new team, with the project leader being Bergis Jules, followed by Dr. Meredith Clark, Ed Sumers, Zakiya Collier, Alexandra Dolan-Mescal, and Francis Kayia. They work at Shift Collective out of New Orleans.
Unfortunately, the project is done and was last updated in 2021. They can no longer update because post-covid when Twitter turned off API for external researchers, they were no longer able to collect data. It was turned off when Elon Musk acquired Twitter, he sued academic researchers who were researching tweets.