Archiving Social Media as Cultural Memory

The Trials, Tribulations, and Arguments for Archiving Social Media as Cultural Memory

Annotations by Maria Schmied

Definition of Project

This annotated bibliography seeks to highlight some of the studies into how and why social media content should be archived and preserved as cultural records. The search terms used to find these articles included “social media,” “social media cultural record,” and “social media archive.” The article databases that provided the most useful article returns were ProQuest and Nexis Uni. Full-text journal articles in English were the only articles included in the search. The articles were selected based on their relevance to the topic of archiving and preserving social media content, specifically for historical purposes as a part of the cultural record. Given the various challenges this subject entails, law literature, studies on historical phenomena, such as record-breaking floods, and government policies were all relevant to this overarching topic. The perspectives presented in the following articles aren’t a monolith, however there is overwhelming support for tackling the challenge of preserving, at a bare minimum, snapshots of the social media stream of content and archiving as a representation of cultural memory and the historical record. The publications listed here include peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings dating from 2012 to 2019.

Annotations

Acker, A., & Kriesberg, A. (2017). Tweets may be archived: Civic engagement, digital preservation and Obama White House social media data. In S. Erdelez & N.K. Agarwal (Eds.). Proceedings of the 80th ASIS&T (Association for Information Science and Technology) Annual Meeting, October 27-November 1, 2017, Washington, D.C. (pp. 1– 9.). John Wiley & Sons, Inc. DOI: 10.1002/pra2.2017.14505401001

Acker and Kriesberg delve into the challenges faced by archivists that are tasked with preserving social media accounts, specifically focusing on the accounts used by the Obama administration. President Obama is considered our first social media president, and the Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts have been treated as part of the United States’ official presidential records. Some of the issues noted by the authors that archivists face when curating and preserving this content are conflicts with proprietary platforms which hide some of the metadata, loss of context when extracting data, and the ever-changing nature of social media. The way in which social media activity is constantly changing poses two distinct challenges for archivists. The most immediate being that if a platform, such as Vine, a video sharing application, is shut down or bought out by a larger corporation, typically all the data and on that platform is lost. The second concern is that due the fact that comments are constantly being added, edited, and deleted from these platforms often archivists will download the data and find they have different records, even when downloaded at the same time.

Botangen, K.A., Vodanovich, S., & Yu, J. (2017). Preservation of indigenous culture among indigenous migrants through social media: The Igorot Peoples. In T. X. Bui & R. Sprague, Jr. (Eds.). Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), January 3-7, 2017, Waikoloa Village, Hawaii (pp. 2303-2312). DOI: 10.24251/HICSS.2017.278

This study found that social media platforms, such as Facebook, have offered indigenous people the opportunity and ability to preserve, share and learn about Indigenous Knowledge (IK). The Igorots have used many of these platforms and technologies to preserve a cultural history, pass on IK and express cultural pride. One of the findings was that instead of being assimilated into the dominant non-indigenous culture, and losing or denying their indigenous heritage, by joining Igorot groups on Facebook, dispersed migrant Igorot people became more connected to their cultural traditions. The researchers also note other indigenous groups such as the Chamorro, the Kelabit, and Amazonian tribes have also successfully utilized social media to create virtual communities.

Cocciolo, A. (2017). Community Archives in the Digital Era: A Case from the LGBT Community. Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture, 45(4), 157-165. DOI: 10.1515/pdtc-2016-00

Cocciolo uses the New York-based LGBT running club, Front Runners, to examine the challenges and solutions that face a non-profit organization in successfully curating and preserving social media and born-digital content. Similar themes are addressed such as the flux of popularity, functionality or existence of various social media platforms. The primary tool discussed to curate the digital data is Omeka, however this tool has challenges with assigning metadata to photographs in certain situations. Other tools mentioned include, Photograbber and downstagram, but each of these tools face challenges of becoming obsolete with every update to Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms. The running club found satisfactory solutions to meet their digital archival needs through creative work-arounds and collaboration, and have curated a cultural memory and accurate account of an underrepresented group. Cocciolo states, however, it is significantly more effort than archiving physical papers and photographs.

El-Showk, S. (2018). Saving the digital world. Nature, 563(7733), S144-S146. DOI: 10.1038/d41586-018-07505-8

El-Showk presents the case that in today’s digital age more of our collective memories, pictures of historical events, such as the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, and other culturally significant items exist only online. For future researchers and historians to have access to these artifacts, archivists have been and need to continue tackling the challenges of preserving online content, particularly that found in social media. Most of social media encompasses online journals, microblogging and sharing digital images, which do have a historical and cultural significance. The challenges are multifaceted as the ease of use of digital technologies has created an explosion in born-digital content to be curated, as well as the important debates regarding privacy and personal information.

Elorreaga, G. M. A. (2019). Don't delete that tweet: Federal and presidential records in the age of social media. St. Mary's Law Journal, 50(1), 483-ii. https://commons.stmarytx.edu/thestmaryslawjournal/vol50/iss1/7

Elorreaga delves into the legislative steps taken by the Obama Administration to establish the first guidelines for social media preservation as official government records. Recognizing that the White House, POTUS and FLOTUS social media accounts have become the new interface between the president and the American people, the archival value in preserving the entirety of these interactions is a matter of public record. By working in tandem with the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the social media accounts were archived much akin to how presidential letters and personal correspondence would be. These public records create part of the historical account of the United States of America and have inherent cultural value.

Fondren, E., & McCune, M. M. (2018). Archiving and preserving social media at the Library of Congress: Institutional and cultural challenges to build a twitter archive. Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture, 47(2), 33-44. DOI: 10.1515/pdtc-2018-0011

Fondren and McCune analyze how the Library of Congress’ Twitter Archive project failed and how it might serve as an example for other institutions and libraries around the world. Many of the issues surrounding the preservation of born-digital content on social media are listed as reasons why this project ultimately faded. One of the elements that is discussed is the volume of digital data being too great for the Library of Congress (LOC) to curate without employing help from the private sector whose main goal is to realize profit. After investing over $100 million into the Twitter Archive, ultimately the goal of curating a cultural memory from this platform didn’t come to fruition. The researchers list privacy concerns and accurate cultural representation as additional detractors from this project’s success.

Henninger, M., & Scifleet, P. (2016). How are the new documents of social networks shaping our cultural memory. Journal of Documentation, 72(2), 277-298. DOI: 10.1108/JD-06-2015-0069

In light of the Library of Congress’ decision to create a Twitter Archive to capture a collective cultural memory from Twitter, Henninger and Scifleet examine the March 2012 flooding of the Murrumbidgee River in Australia through the lens of using related social media activity as a historical record. They demonstrated “how the material framework of SNS [social networking sites] contributes to people’s sense of belonging within a discourse and social space for sharing memories” (p. 292). They also reflect on how social media content could be curated and classified as cultural memory, which Jan Assmann has defined as “the more conscientious preservation of records of significance” (p. 293). They also argue that despite the temporal nature of social media, of which the human experience can also just as easily be classified as fleeting, that archivists are still compelled to preserve artifacts for the future. Ultimately, Henninger and Scifleet feel that the challenges in archiving SNS content, such as privacy, informed consent and mechanics, are outweighed by the idea that “communities are framed by the narrative of their shared memories, the telling and re-telling of their stories” (p. 293) such as the events surrounding the 2012 Murrumbidgee River flood.

Lee, G., Love, V., & Moran, J. (2019). Archiving social media at the Alexander Turnbull Library, Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa National Library of New Zealand. Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture, 48(3-4), 129-134. DOI: 10.1515/pdtc-2019-0017

Lee et al. share how the Turnbull Library in New Zealand has piloted a few projects to capture and archive social media materials to record modern-day culture in New Zealand. After an initial unfruitful Twitter harvest, an earthquake hit New Zealand and the resulting flurry of tweets and related hashtags provided a ripe harvest for the library. This event-specific harvesting method was repeated for the general elections, the Christchurch Mosque shootings and the Ihumātao land rights movement. A separate project focused on archiving Facebook (FB) content, titled ATL100 Facebook Archive, solicited voluntary donations of 100 FB account archives. To address the concerns regarding privacy, three levels of access were offered to the account donors. They could choose to have their personal account archive restricted and unavailable to researchers for 100 years, 25 years or “available to researchers [immediately] but restricted to onsite only access in the secure reading room” (p. 132). Most participants selected to make their donated FB content available immediately. These examples highlight two methods, event focused Twitter harvests and giving individuals multiple options for privacy restriction for their donated social media content, to help archival institutions successfully capture social media activity and curate a cultural record.

McNealy, J. E. (2012). The privacy implications of digital preservation: Social media archives and the social networks theory of privacy. Elon University Law Review, 3(2), 133-160. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2027036

McNealy discusses how “memory institutions” (p. 134), such as libraries, museums and archives, that are tasked to “preserve, collect, store and display cultural and historic artifacts” (p. 134) have also been tasked to preserve “born digital” (p. 134) information as part of our “digital heritage” (p. 133). The National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIIP) was established in 2000 with a directive to preserve digital information. There is some debate regarding whether social media users have a right to privacy when their social media activity is being archived and later studied by researchers since by nature social media interactions occur in what is now considered the modern equivalent of the town square. However, there are some attempts being made to give individuals some semblance of privacy and control over their digital data.

Smit, A. (2019). Considering YouTube's value as a historical source, with reference to the 2015-2017 drought in the Vaal Triangle. Historia, 64(1), 140-165. DOI: 10.17159/2309-8392/2019/v64n1a7

Smit analyzes the YouTube video content related to the Vaal Triangle drought and its potential to be used as historical record of the event. Some of the concerns regarding using this form of social media include the ephemeral nature of social media content and the potential to use something based on the number of views but turns out is “click-bait” (p. 152). While the fleeting nature of social media content has been discussed in other articles, Smit reflects on both the “usability and reliability of YouTube as a historical source” (p. 17). One aspect to consider is whether content creator consent is required to use a video that has been posted in a public domain. An additional consideration is the “security policies of social media sites”, which might result in the platform or content creator removing a video. This contradicts the image of YouTube as a repository and Smit suggests downloading social media content that is to be preserved as a historical record instead of taking the chance that it, and YouTube, will reliably endure. Despite these concerns, Smit argues that YouTube videos can augment traditional media content, such as newspaper articles, in archives and create a more holistic historical record.