DocNow – Documenting the Now

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DocNow – Documenting the Now

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slidedeck

some evolving slides about Documenting the Now

On Github DocNow / slidedeck

www.docnow.io/slidedeck/

Vernon Mitchell Jr. @vcmitchelljrBergis Jules @bergisjulesEd Summers @edsu

Thank you for coming to this session. I realize there are lots of other interesting presentations going on and I appreciate you coming to hear a little bit about what we are working on in the Documenting the Now project.

Please interrupt me as I'm talking because if you are wondering about it I imagine someone else is too. If it turns out to be an involved question I may ask to wait until the q/a session, but it's useful to bookmark them as they come up.

So what is Documenting the Now? As you know social media is an increasingly prevalent part of American life. For example can we hope to understand what happened in this year's election without social media? Documenting the Now is a two year effort to help develop tools, community and ethical practices around the collection, use and preservation of social media content.

The names you see on this slide are the primary investigators from each university. I would also like to acknowledge the work of Merdith Evans and Chris Freeland who worked with Bergis and I to help establish DocNow as a project at Washington University before handing things over to the capable hands of Vernon Mitchell.

Partnership between:
  • Washington University in St Louis
  • University of California at Riverside
  • University of Maryland
With generous funding from the Mellon Foundation, which we are very grateful for.
These are some of the folks whose work I'm presenting today.
And our extremeley helpful and generous advisory board who joined us for our meeting this summer in St Louis.
  • Natalie Baur
  • Meredith Clark
  • Tressie McMillan Cottom
  • Brian Dietz
  • Jarrett Drake
  • Meredith Evans
  • Jonathan Fendeson
  • Deen Freelon
  • Jessica Johnson
  • Robin Katz
  • David Kim
  • Mark Anthony Neal
  • Michael Nelson
  • Yvonne Ng
  • Matt Phillips
  • Rashawn Ray
  • Nicholas Taylor
  • Dexter Thomas
  • Stacie Williams
  • Micah Zeller
app.docnow.io We have a prototype or strawman application we've been using as a way to learn how to work together as a distributed team and also as a way to explore the design space I'm going to be talking about today. Please feel free to try to use it while I'm talking and we can talk more about it during the Q & A.
Tools / Community / Ethics This slide obvioulsy encompasses a great deal of territory. I cram them together on the same slide because, for us, they are extremely interdependent. Provide cloud ready, open source tools that allows users to build, study and preserve social media collections. Facilitate and promote the study of social media content to inform the scholarly and public discourse within the digital preservation community. Develop a white paper that documents the ethical considerations and practices that are embodied in our work to archive tweets from Ferguson protests of 2014.

Our work really began in August of 2014 when an African American teenager named Michael Brown was killed by a police officer named Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Bergis and I who were at a Society of American Archivists meeting here in DC decided to do what we could to collect the conversation that was happening in Twitter about the killing and the protests.

We collected 13 million tweets from the first two weeks, which mentioned the word "ferguson". We also wrote about the work we were doing on a public blog. The first post is what you see here on this slide. It's clickable.

Engaging with a larger audience about what we were doing proved to be instrumental...almost more important than the act of doing the initial data collection itself.

Of course, Michael Brown wasn't the first unarmed African American teenager to have been killed by the police in the United States. But what we (or at least I) didn't know at the time is that the heightenened awareness that social media had brought to the case of Michael Brown would bring sustained attention to the issue, as more cases came up, and that this attention would be driven by the rise of the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

We continued to do data collection around these issues as we could. This slide here links to a grim TimeMapper visualization for the datasets we created.

It's sad to reflect that increasingly these data collections feel like liabilities. We weren't the only people doing this data collection. As we know from Snowden and from just watching the news, social media is heavily surveilled by defense, intelligence and law enforcement organizations. We also know that in some cases access to law enforcement has been cut off.

While several groups of researchers have been working with our Ferguson dataset at the University of Maryland, the very first people to contact me after they read a blog post about our work was a defense contracting company in Boston. Here's the email they sent. Note the date, it was just 1 week after the event.

In doing this work Bergis and I got a sense of what kinds of tools were needed to do the work. It was around this time in the summer of 2015 that we got in conversation with the Mellon Foundation about some financial support to the work and conversation that we were building.

  • If you have heard Bergis Jules speak recently you'll know that it's important for the DocNow project to recognize that Data is People.
  • +Rasheen Aldridge+, Meredith Evans, Jonathan Fenderson, +Kayla Reed+, +Alexis Templeton+, +Reuben Riggs+, Makiba Foster and Vernon Mitchell

Affordancesfor ethical practices

  • Notification
  • Opt-Out ... and Opt-In
  • Data Retention Policies
  • Tweet IDs and Hydration
  • Traditional Knowledge Labels
  • Warrant Canaries
  • Appraisal
  • Deed of Gift ... from the content creators!
So what are the affordances for the ethical data collection that we are building into the application? And how are we developing them?
Big Data I know you've heard of the term Big Data. We are interested in Big Data, we want our application to scale and to be deployed to "The Cloud". But this is not our primary goal. Our primary goal is instead oriented around the idea of
small data Small data is an idea that I first heard about in this paper by two Amelias: Abrieu and Acker. In small data

Want to help?

?!
www.docnow.io/slidedeck/ Vernon Mitchell Jr. @vcmitchelljr Bergis Jules @bergisjules Ed Summers @edsu Thank you for coming to this session. I realize there are lots of other interesting presentations going on and I appreciate you coming to hear a little bit about what we are working on in the Documenting the Now project. Please interrupt me as I'm talking because if you are wondering about it I imagine someone else is too. If it turns out to be an involved question I may ask to wait until the q/a session, but it's useful to bookmark them as they come up. So what is Documenting the Now? As you know social media is an increasingly prevalent part of American life. For example can we hope to understand what happened in this year's election without social media? Documenting the Now is a two year effort to help develop tools, community and ethical practices around the collection, use and preservation of social media content. The names you see on this slide are the primary investigators from each university. I would also like to acknowledge the work of Merdith Evans and Chris Freeland who worked with Bergis and I to help establish DocNow as a project at Washington University before handing things over to the capable hands of Vernon Mitchell.