Ed Summers (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities) wrote a post explaining the background and genesis of the Mellon-supported Documenting the Now project. Developed in partnership with Chris Freeland (Washington University in St. Louis) and Bergis Jules (University of California at Riverside), the project has two main goals:
The first is to develop an open source Web application called DocNow that will allow researchers and archivists to easily collect, analyze and preserve Twitter messages and the Web resources they reference. The second is to cultivate a much needed conversation between scholars, archivists, journalists and human rights activists around the effective and ethical use of social media content.
Summers’s post helpfully situates the project within the larger landscape of web archiving and social media archiving specifically.
Updated 25 Feb 2016 to include Chris Freeland at WUSTL. The original post listed Meredith Evans as the PI from Washington University in St. Louis (she has moved on to the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library since the project began).
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