Social Media Preservation
Social Media Preservation: The democratization of archives in the age of Facebook and Twitter.
Annotations by Jillien Zudell
Definition of Project
This bibliography presents annotations of recently published literature that address the collection and preservation of social media activity documenting historical and cultural information. These selections meet at least one of the two following criteria: the paper must discuss the general practice of preserving social media activity within a cultural institution, and / or speak to the democratizing impact of archiving social media content. Publications discussing the preservation of social media content within a historical agency or an archive discuss issues with technical requirements, ownership of content, and the risk to creators and subjects when choosing to aggregate social media content. They also point to the emerging recognition of the value of cultural knowledge created via this relatively new technology. In the publications addressing the democratization of archival holdings, social media archiving is shown to lead to the increased inclusion of traditionally marginalized populations. The examples found in this bibliography include explorations of various communities, such as the Syrian Archive, which documents and provides access to evidence about human rights violations, the collection of social media surrounding the Igorot culture of the Philippines, which examines how indigenous migrants are preserving their cultural knowledge, and finally how the transgender population uses social media to build a community and document their transitions. These articles were located by searching library catalogs using the search terms “social media and preservation,” “social media and political activism,” and “social media in archives.” This bibliography is limited to articles published since 2015, as this allows for the inclusion of the most recent research on the topic; articles are primarily sourced from peer reviewed, academic journals and two American Library Association publications.
Annotations
Aronson, J. (2017). Preserving human rights media for justice, accountability, and historical clarification. Genocide Studies and Prevention: an International Journal, 11(1), 82-99. Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/gsp/vol11/iss1/9/
This article explores the preservation of digital media, shared via social media platforms, as a means of documenting human right violations. In doing so, it addresses technical requirements and common ethical and legal issues that arise from archiving these records. Issues that may arise include the wellbeing of creators or subjects of the records, and the protection of the presumption of innocence for those who are presumed to be depicted committing a crime. Where this article excels is in its discussion of the distribution of content via social media in relation to the ownership of said material. The author notes that content may be actively archived by the creator (either personally or at an institution), it may be found by public audiences on a given platform, or it may be taken from a private message and disseminated without the direct consent of the creator. The two latter processes, which the author uses as his primary focus, are where ethical and legal issues generally arise since they do not follow traditional archival processes. The consideration of content ownership does play a part in archiving social media records because ownership and copyright impact how a record can be used by an organization or researcher. Despite these complications, the author makes a strong argument for the continued collection of material with limited access in the case of human rights violations documentation.
Barnett, J. (2015) Social media: Fleshy metamorphosis: Temporal pedagogies of transsexual counterpublics. In L.G Spencer & J.C, Capuzza (Eds.) Transgender Communication Studies: Histories, Trends, and Trajectories, (pp. 155-169). Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
This chapter explores the visual archive of the chemical and surgical transition process of Joshua Riverdale recorded through a WordPress blog titled “Gender Outlaw.” In doing so, the article uses one example of how a member of the transgender community used social media to document his transition, thus creating a public record of his experience. The case study offers some general commentary on the community building that occurs in social media interactions, as well as on representation issues that affect those in the transgender community. The conclusion is the most useful portion of the chapter for archivists as it touches on areas that would benefit from additional academic investigation. The author recommends that archivists develop practices that allow for the collection of digital documentation of photographs and other records beyond iconic images that have gone viral. By widening the scope of collection practices, archivists can ensure that the digital record of the transgender community, as well as other underrepresented populations, are more representative of the whole community rather than only big names or events. This chapter would be beneficial to archivist as it can help them understand some of the ways visual and online representation impact and are utilized by the transgender community.
Botangen, K. A., Shahper, V., and Jian, Y. (2018) Preservation of indigenous culture among indigenous migrants through social media: The Igorot Peoples. Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2017, 2303-2312. Honolulu: University of Hawaii at Manoa. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.09685
This study considers the use of social media by migrant indigenous populations, specifically the Igorot people of the Philippines, as a tool of preserving their culture. The use in mainstream technology, such as internet-based social media platforms, would seem to counter the isolated traditions of indigenous people. However, the authors argue that the visual and storytelling elements of social media mirror the oral traditions that are usually used to passed down tribal knowledge and customs. Moreover, the authors argue that the use of social media to preserve and share the tribal traditions helps to strengthen an individual’s identity and pride in being an indigenous person. By highlighting this purpose of digital preservation via social media, information professionals are reminded of the large array of motivations for such tasks. What the authors fail to address in their discussion of the use of social media as a positive tool of cultural preservation is the inconsistent lack of access to internet and computer based resources for many indigenous communities as poverty and access to resources are often a significant factors in said communities. The exclusion of this discussion could be because of the focus on migrant indigenous people which implies that they are living in metropolitan areas. Nevertheless, access to technology, and therefore social media, is something that would affect how individuals interact with the online indigenous communities. This article is significant because it addresses the digital preservation using social media that is guided by and for the benefit of the indigenous people rather than an institutional collection.
Condron, M. (2018). Archiving social media. In Marshall (Ed.), The complete guide to personal digital archiving. (pp. 19-31). Chicago: ALA Editions.
Included in a recent American Library Association publication titled The Complete Guide to Personal Digital Archiving, Melody Condron’s chapter details the role of librarians in the process of archiving social media. The chapter offers a quick overview of various platforms and issues that arise with social media content. It is a valuable, yet brief, resource for finding tools that can be used by librarians and their patrons to archive social media content. Many of the tools are focused on archiving one’s own content; however, examples such as Social Searcher and Tagboard can be used to aggregate hashtags or topics across various platforms from most popular or recent posts. Even a cursory knowledge of these topics will help librarians to better serve their patrons and to update their institutional collections.
Deutch, J. and H.Habal. (2018) The Syrian Archive: A methodological case study of open-source investigation of state crime using video evidence from social media platforms. State Crime and Digital Resistance, 7(1), p. 46-76.
The case study focused on the Syrian Archive traces the methodology of creating an open-source archive that documents an on-going, multi-front humanitarian crisis. The archive, which strives to collect offenses by parties on all sides of the Syrian conflict, must deal with many of the same issues that other digital archives face: non-standard file formats, loss of metadata, verification of authenticity, and the safety of the creator or subjects. The example detailed in this article should serve as a reminder to information professionals about the future of record keeping during crisis situations. As personal devices become more and more common place, even in remote locations, video and photographic evidence of conflict will continue to increase. The instant sharing of those records via social media platforms and their subsequent collection can help insure the content is preserved even if the device or creator is lost or unknown.
Library of Congress (2013). Update on the Twitter archive at the Library of Congress. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/static/managed-content/uploads/sites/6/2017/02/twitter_report_2013jan.pdf
The Library of Congress whitepaper regarding the acquisition of the Twitter Archive is as brief as it is significant to the understanding of the practice of social media archiving. The decision to collect social media records by such a notable institution such as the Library of Congress demonstrates the increasing impact of social media platforms as well as an effort to collect meaningful cultural documentation. Moreover, the acquisition demonstrates the LOC’s recognition of changes in the way records are being created, the value of preserving multiple perspectives on a topic, and the impact this information may have for future generations. The whitepaper closes with a brief discussion of access to the collection: because of the scale, technical requirements, and “intent of the producers,” the collection is currently blocked from general use (p.2). The issues associated with access to the Twitter archive are indicative of the issues smaller institutions may also experience should they move to include social media records in their archive collections.
Littman, J., D. Chudonov, D. Kerchner, C. Peterson, Y. Tan, R.Trent, R. Vij, L. Wrubel. (2018). API-based social media collecting as a form of web archiving. International Journal on Digital Libraries, 19(1), 21-38.
This article discusses the continued development and use of an API-based application called Social Feed Manager as a tool to help with the aggregation of records on social media platforms. Although the open source application SFM was developed to help researchers, it can also be used to collect social media records for other web-archiving purposes as well. By continuing to develop the application, the team responsible for creating SFM is working to meet the needs of current and future scholars. This article is valuable to information professionals because it details the development of emerging technology that can be used to facilitate the collection and preservation of culturally valuable records across social media platforms.
Mylonas, Y. (2017). Witnessing absences: Social media as archives and public spheres. Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, 23(3).
Yiannis Mylonas demonstrates how social media content and communities can correct for absences that are too often found in traditional archives. Using the example of Thessaloniki, Greece, he explores user-generated, photograph-based content on Facebook and Youtube to explore the ways that people used social media to document their history. In this case, the author claims that the democratization of the archiving process that worked to enrich cultural toleration and understanding. This article is valuable for information professionals because it explores the effects of social media content archives using a specific example rather than exploring the technical processes involved. In doing so, archivists are reminded of the reason for archiving social media content.
Weller, K (2016). Digital traces of user-generated content: How social media data may become the historical sources of the future. In Foster and Rafferty (Eds.) Managing digital cultural objects: Analysis, discovery and retrieval (pp. 61-86). United States: ALA Neal Schuman.
Katrin Weller's contribution to this American Library Association published book on digital cultural objects is an enlightening overview of the social media platforms, how they work, how content can be, at times, worthy objects that document cultural heritage, and some of the significant issues that affect their preservation. A broad scope of information is covered in the single chapter on the topic, but it provides a valuable summary for new information professionals.
Yaco, S., A. Jimerson, L. Caldwell Anderson, C. Temple. (2015). A web-based community-building archives project: A case study of Kids in Birmingham 1963. Archival Science, 15(4).
This article details the Kids in Birmingham 1963 archival project that work to collect the stories of the children who experienced that tumultuous year in Alabama first hand. The project was an effort to gather stories about the events in Birmingham in 1963, not from active participants, but rather from the young people who witnessed those events. Although most stories were submitted through the project website, an Facebook community developed as conversations took place on the social media platform. What resulted was a user-generated oral history collection and a valuable resource for educators and historians. At the time the article was published, the director of the project was “evaluating possible repositories” to guarantee that the collection would be preserved. The example seen in this article demonstrates how social media and other web-based applications can be used by archivist and cultural heritage organizations to collect cultural heritage knowledge. It also serves as a reminder that the mere collection of that information is not sufficient on its own; steps must also be taken to securely preserve the knowledge for future generations.
