Documenting the Now Is Documenting History

Following the 2014 shooting death of unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown by white policeman Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, massive protests erupted. As demonstrators and activists were confronted by police in riot gear and employing tear gas, the world was watching—not on TV, but on social media, and specifically Twitter, where the platform’s users were reporting events in real time though tweets, photos, and videos.

Like millions of others at that moment, archivist Bergis Jules was “glued” to Twitter, he says, “because so much information was being shared about what was happening on the ground in Ferguson.” For Jules, at the time an archivist at the University of California, Riverside, the content recording the protests and demonstrations of Black Lives Matter activists in Ferguson was a vital historical record in the making, one he felt an urgency to preserve for the future.

The question of how to collect such a vast and ephemeral dataset continued to occupy his mind when he arrived, just days after the shooting, in Washington, DC, for the Society of American Archivists annual conference. Also in attendance was Edward Summers, lead software developer at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland. As it happened, Summers had already created a Twitter archiving tool called twarc, which he and Jules began using to gather tweets with Ferguson hashtags and their metadata. Within two weeks, they had collected some 13 million posts.

Summers then wrote a blog post about the Ferguson archive, which he and Jules were thinking of publishing, and invited reader feedback.

The response from the archiving community was overwhelmingly negative, cautioning that, although Twitter is a public platform, the project raised ethical issues about archivists’ responsibility to protect the identities of activists and bystanders when collecting and analyzing social media. Who would have access to the data collected? What if law enforcement or government agencies wanted to use the data to monitor activists? Even if Twitter users granted permission, was every post worth saving for posterity?

“Folks were rightfully questioning whether we had permission to collect the tweets and the associated content,” Jules recalls. “And also questioning how we were applying care to archiving traumatizing content. And that really stuck with us. We forgot the human beings in the process.”

In 2016, with support from a Mellon Foundation grant, Jules and Summers formed Documenting the Now. DocNow, as it is called, aims to provide a social media archiving model to serve the needs of archivists and researchers as well as activist content-creators and nonacademic memory workers. From the beginning, the founders adopted a community-facing approach, creating a Slack channel where activists, archivists, librarians, and scholars gave unfiltered feedback on protocols and tools that were eventually put in place.  

That crowd-sourcing approach was intentional. Rather than amassing its own data, DocNow dedicates its efforts to empowering a broad sector of cultural memory workers who have traditionally been left out of established archiving networks to build their own archives. Keeping the data in the hands of content creators will lead to more complete narratives.  

DocNow’s consistent push for inclusivity has succeeded largely because the team “practices transparency in its work and invites people into the project,” explains Jules. In 2023, DocNow is directed by Shift Collective, a nonprofit design and consulting group that helps organizations working at the intersection of social justice and community archiving to create effective programming that best serves their constituencies. 

Both Jules and Summers, who is now a software developer at the Stanford University library, continue to lead the DocNow project. In collaboration with Shift Collective and Princeton University, DocNow is pursuing new goals, including mapping out a long-term sustainability plan, launching a podcast on Black digital culture, and responding to the needs of its growing community of users. 

In 2020, in a tragic echo of its founding, DocNow put out a call for archivists and memory workers to help support activists documenting police violence at protests following the murder of a Black man, George Floyd, by Minneapolis police. 

Changes in the social media landscape, including those unfolding in 2023 at Twitter, underscore the importance of preserving digital artifacts that provide first-person accounts of current events. DocNow continues its original social justice web-archiving mission, and its work is more urgent than ever.