DocNow Review

Reviewers: Benjamin Mørch and Kyle Sherman

Digital Project: https://www.docnow.io/

Data and Sources

Twitter is the primary source. GitHub Repositories for the different projects.

Processes

There have been two phases. The first is the development and continued support of the digital tools found on the DocNow website. The second phase is to work directly with activist groups to run a co-learning workshop.

Presentation

The project website is introduced with sliding images showing community engagement with text explaining what the DocNow project is about. At the top of the website is a bar where you can navigate to the specific part of the page: About, Tools, workshops, get involved, the team, meetings, and news. You are never navigated to another part of the site since all the information is presented on the first page. Additionally, there are links to different sites, individual tools, and supporting documents.

Digital Tools Used to Build It

GitHub Repositories

Languages

English

Summary

The Documenting the Now (DocNow) project’s primary aim is to help preserve and chronicalize historically significant events and other digitally relevant content found on social media sites. It focuses on providing a variety of digital tools, as well as acts as an appraisal of content, to help analyze social media content. A strong focus on ethical collection and preservation of social media data adheres to Twitter’s notion of honoring the user intent as well as preserving the rights of content creators. Questions remain as to how conflict between preservation authenticity and content modifications is handled.

Project Origin

The originator of this project can be attributed to two individuals, Bergis Jules and Dr. Meredith D. Clark. Mr. Jules is the Project Director and Co-Principal Investigator who utilizes his Master’s degree in Library and Information Science with a Specialization in Archives and Records Management and a Master’s degree in African American and African Diaspora Studies. Dr. Clark is the Academic Lead and Co-Principal Investigator who is also an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia who focused her academic dissertation on Black Twitter. The DocNow project is a collaboration between the University of Maryland, the University of Virginia, and the Shift Collective. Mr. Jules is the founding member of the Shift Collective, a restructured 503(c)3 non-profit organization and Louisiana corporation that aligns with the DocNow project as it is a design and community-driven support organization to promote cultural and resource equity. The Shift Collective began in 2020 (formally named Shift Design, Inc which was founded in 2011) and has collaborated closely with the UK charity-based organization Shift, which uses design thinking to collectively respond to social issues. Nick Stanhope, who holds a BA Hons in History from Oxford University, is the Founder and CEO of Shift who began the organization as a start-up in 2010.

Financials

There have been three distinct financial phases for this project. The first was the creation and launch of the project with a grant to Washington University, The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities in the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland, Shift, and the Department of Media Studies at the University of Virginia. The second and third financial phases come from their primary financial benefactor, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation which is the largest supporter of the Arts and Humanities in the US. DocNow has been awarded two grants totaling $2,050,000. The first grant ($1,200,000) was given to the University of Maryland at College Park in 2018 to assist in DocNow’s Phase 2, which was to support the preservation of web-based resources collected through social media platforms. The second grant ($850,000) was given to Shift Design, Inc. in 2021 to assist in DocNow’s Phase III, which is to support sustainability planning and further capacity building for archiving social media content.

Project Details

The DocNow project has created different tools to collect and preserve social media data with a specific focus on Twitter. The website consists of six different tools created by the DocNow project which are all accessible via GitHub, a software development platform. Utilizing GitHub allows the organization to create a more open and accessible participatory environment, which agrees with their community-based approach.

Fig 1. - Historical Contributions to main GitHub

The biggest part is the DocNow web application is that it appraises Twitter for archival and research collection. It gives the opportunity to retrieve tweets and to analyze different datasets from Twitter like popular hashtags, users, referenced URLs, etc. This specific tool is the main focus of the project and gives the opportunity to collect and preserve digital content from Twitter. Is it referenced on the site as a user-friendly tool for scholars, students, archivists, etc.​​, but if you do not have knowledge about GitHub or coding it is very difficult to start using it. There exists no introduction to using it without the pre-existing knowledge.

The team has created five additional tools that deal with different aspects of collecting social media data which contributes to the overall purpose of civic action. Twarc offers a catalog of Twitter datasets, a tool that can turn tweet IDs into JSON and CSV files. Diff Engine provides a more streamlined way to track and analyze changes in news articles via RSS feeds. Some of them are more user-friendly like Tweet Catalog which brings together other users' collections of tweets for specific themes and the ethically minded Social Humans Labels. It will give you the tweet IDs which then can be “dehydrated” to give you the insight, but if a user has deleted the tweet it will not show up in the dataset. Also according to the project's ethics. These are all relevant tools for archivists, activists, and researchers wishing to work with social media data.

Fig. 2 - An Image of Tools created by DocNow

The purpose of the project is not only to create the tools, but also spread the knowledge and use of them through workshops, outreach, etc. Though this part of the project has stalled, most likely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, since the last workshop was held in 2019.

Limitations

The fact that the website is only presented in English is ironic. As a civic-minded, culturally inclusive, and community-conscious organization, it would be expected that the website would at least be available in Spanish since it is the second most used language in the United States as well as a significant cultural segment of the population that could use their services.

In many ways, the site offers a large range of tools and additional resources to create a way for archivists, activists, and researchers to gather social media data. Yet, users are presented with sparing text bites regarding the purpose of the project and the different tools. Additionally, the self-proclaimed goal of the project is to be a more user-friendly method of civic engagement in the collection and preservation process, but without pre-existing knowledge of how to use tools like GitHub, there is a significant technological barrier. This digital divide impedes and stymies the entire purpose of the project. Their co-learning workshops were designed to mitigate the digital disparity, but the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted the progress. Their last workshop was held on October 26, 2019.