Documenting the Now

Documenting the Now is a project with two overlapping efforts. First, it develops a set of tools to help researchers work with data from Twitter. Second, it brings together a community of users and developers concerned with the ethical use and preservation of data from social media. The project began in 2014 at the Society of American Archivists annual meeting in Washington, D.C., which happened to coincide with the murder of Michael Brown, an unarmed African American teenager, by the white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Attendees at the conference talked informally about what could be done to document the local protests that were being broadcast to a global audience on social media. What began as an effort by Bergis Jules at the University of California, Riverside, library, Ed Summers at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, and Meredith Evans at Washington University in St. Louis to document and preserve social media activity surrounding the events in Ferguson grew into a successful Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant proposal for Documenting the Now

Library science · Media studies · Officer · Political science · Social media · Sociology · White (mutation · Computer Science · Digital and Traditional Archives Management · History · Law