Documenting the Now

Social Media and the Archival Imagination


Ed Summers
University of Maryland
edsu@umd.edu / @edsu

https://edsu.github.io/peaceworks/

Overview

  1. The Archive
  2. BlackLivesMatter
  3. Documenting the Now

The library is a growing organism.


S. R. Ranganathan
Five Laws of Library Science

The existence, preservation and availability of archives, documents, records in our society are very much determined by the distribution of wealth and power. That is, the most powerful, the richest elements in society have the greatest capacity to find documents, preserve them, and decide what is or is not available to the public. This means government, business and the military are dominant.


Howard Zinn
Secrecy, Archives, and the Public Interest
% twarc search ferguson
% twarc filter ferguson

13,480,00 tweets

August 10, 2014 - August 27, 2014

63G of JSON

8.4G compressed

Not just 140 characters

  • time
  • hashtags
  • geo coordinates
  • places
  • embedded media
  • retweet
  • reply to
  • user
  • profile
  • avatar
  • follower count
  • Twitter API

JSON

August 10-27, 2014

417,972 Unique Unshortened URLs

UMD Ferguson
Town Hall Meeting

December 3, 2014

#BlackLivesMatter

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