Documenting the Now

About

Documenting the Now responds to the public's use of social media for chronicling historically significant events as well as demand from scholars, students, and archivists, among others, seeking a user-friendly means of collecting and preserving this type of digital content. Documenting the Now has a strong commitment to prioritizing ethical practices when working with social media content, especially in terms of collection and long-term preservation. This commitment extends to Twitter's notion of honoring user intent and the rights of content creators. The project is a collaborative effort between Shift Design, Inc., the University of Maryland, and the University of Virginia. We are extremely grateful for funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Tools

We are building a variety of tools to help archivists, activists and researchers work with social media data. Some of these require tech know-how to get running, so please reach out to us on Slack if you are interested in using them, but not sure where to begin. We also publish Design Documents for guiding our development, and would welcome your feedback.

DocNow

Appraise Twitter for archival and research collections.

Tweet Catalog

A catalog of publicly shared tweet ID sets. Add yours!

Hydrator

"Rehydrate" tweet ID sets into tweets with metadata.

Social Humans Labels

Labels for ethically describing and sharing social media data.

Twarc

Archive Twitter JSON using this command line tool.

Diff Engine

Track changes in news articles through RSS feeds.

AFFILIATED
PROJECTS:

Webrecorder

SFM

Open Archive

Mukurtu

Get Involved

Mailchimp

Twitter

Medium

Read and respond

Slack

Join the conversation

GitHub

Participate in our code

The Team

Dr. Meredith Clark
Academic Lead, Co-Principal Investigator

Bergis Jules
Project Director, Co-Principal Investigator

Trevor Muñoz
Administrative Lead, Principal Investigator

Micha Broadnax
Community Workshop Trainer

Alexandra Dolan-Mescal
UX and Web Designer

Jarrett Drake
Community Workshop Trainer

Francis Kayiwa
DevOps Engineer

T'Sey-Haye Preaster
Project Manager

Ed Summers
Technical Lead

Raff Viglianti
Software Developer

Susan Weisner
Administrative Coordinator

Former Team Members

Vernon Mitchell
Administrative Lead 2017
Chris Freeland
Administrative Lead 2016
Timothy Cole
Project Manager 2017
Desiree Smith-Jones
Project Manager 2016
Dan Chudnov
Data Engineer 2016-2017

Meetings

Building a community of practice around social media and Web archiving is one of the most significant aspects to the work we are doing in the Documenting the Now project. Mellon has generously funded us to hold two face-to-face meetings, one in 2016 and another in 2017. These meetings allow us to bring our advisory board together and incorporate live streaming to engage with a larger audience.

August 3, 2019 Texas After Violence Workshop (Austin, TX)
May 11, 2019 Don't Shoot PDX Workshop (Portland, OR)
March 30, 2019 Southern California Library Workshop (Los Angeles, CA)
March 22-24, 2018 Ethics in Archiving the Web Symposium (New York, NY)
December 11-12, 2017 Digital Blackness in the Archive: A Documenting the Now Symposium (Ferguson/St. Louis, MO)
February 15, 2017 #DocNowCommunity and #SNAPRT Twitter Chat: Ethics and Archiving Social Media: Perspectives from Students and New Archives Professionals
August 21-23, 2016 Advisory Board Meeting at Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri
August 11, 2016 #DocNowCommunity Twitter Chat 2: Social Media Research
July 14, 2016 #DocNowCommunity Twitter Chat 1: Project Introduction

Advisory Board

Advisory board members are active participants in the development of DocNow. Board members were carefully chosen because of their expertise as archivists, librarians, computer scientists, historians, software developers, librarians, sociologists, and journalists, and in many cases their work has directly influenced how the DocNow project was designed. We’re extremely thankful to this group and their continued support and active involvement in the project.

Natalie Baur, Preservation Librarian, El Colegio de México
Tressie McMillan Cottom, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Virginia Commonwealth University
Brian Dietz, Digital Program Librarian, North Carolina Statue University
Jarrett Drake, Digital Archivist, Princeton University
Meredith Evans, Director, Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum
Jonathan Fenderson, Assistant Professor of African & American Studies, Washington University St. Louis
Deen Freelon, Assistant Professor of Communication, American University
Jessica Johnson, Assistant Professor of History, Michigan State University
Robin Katz, Public Services Librarian, University of California at Riverside

David Kim, Project Manager, Colored Conventions, University of Delaware
Mark Anthony Neal, Professor of African American Studies, Duke University
Michael Nelson, Professor of Computer Science, Old Dominion University
Yvonne Ng, Senior Archivist, WITNESS
Matt Phillips, Lead Developer, Library Innovation Lab at Harvard University
Rashawn Ray, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Maryland
Nicholas Taylor, Web Archiving Service Manager, Stanford University
Dexter Thomas, Writer, Los Angeles Times
Stacie Williams, Learning Lab Manager, University of Kentucky
Micah Zeller, Copyright and Digital Access Librarian, Washington University St Louis

News

07/2019 Social Control Zine by Alexandra Dolan-Mescal.
05/2019 Tractar i preservar fons de la web social. by Aniol Maria, Associació d’Arxivers i Gestors de Documents de Catalunya.
05/2019 Designing the Archival Experience of Self and Society by Alexandra Dolan-Mescal, Personal Digital Archiving, 2019.
03/2019 Capturing History, 280 Characters at a Time by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
03/2019 Call for Applications for Community-Based Digital Archives Workshops for Activists by Documenting the Now.
12/2018 Black Twitter 101: What is it? Where did it originate? Where is it Headed? by Whitlaw Read, UVA Today.
12/2018 Preservation Acts: Toward an Ethical Archive by Nora Caplan-Bricker, Harpers Magazine.
10/2018 Community/Capacity Award. Digital Library Federation.
08/2018 Exemplary Service Award. Society of American Archivists.
04/2018 Ethical Considerations for Archiving Social Media Content Generated by Contemporary Social Movements white paper published.
08/2017 Meet the digital librarians saving social media posts to protect human rights. Antony Funnell. Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
08/2017 Human rights and the archiving opportunities and challenges of the digital world. Future Tense.
08/2017 In 100 years, will today's digital files be accessible? Planning for digital obsolescence. St. Louis Public Radio.
01/2017 Digital Spotlight: DocNow, Chronicling Historically Significant Events, American Theological Library Association.
11/2016 Doing Right Online: Archivists Shape an Ethics for the Digital Age, American Historical Association.
07/2016 Universities finding new ways to preserve history in the making – like Ferguson, St. Louis Dispatch.
06/2016 How an Archive of the Internet Could Change History, The New York Times.
05/2016 Documenting the Now Builds Social Media Archive, Library Journal.
03/2016 Archive the Future part II: Documenting the Now, Lost in the Stacks Podcast.
02/2016 Introducing Documenting the Now, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.
01/2016 UCR receives $517,000 to collaborate on social media archiving project, The Highlander.
01/2016 Documenting the Now: Archiving Social Media for Generations to Come, WUSTL University Libraries.
05/2015 The Politics Of Archiving #BlackLivesMatter, Baltimore Public Radio.