by Obinnaya Oji
Quick Summary
Obinnaya Oji reports on one of the keynote presentations at the 2018 Library Technology Conference.
The presentation "Slow Archiving the Web: A Case for Care in Archival Praxis," by Bergis Jules, University Archivist at the University of California, Riverside at the 2018 Library Technology Conference hosted by Macalester College was very engaging. Bergis Jules is the project director for Inland Empire Memories, a consortium of local cultural heritage organizations. His research is focused on representation of African Americans in archives on the web.
I was fascinated with his involvement as the community lead on the Documenting the Now (DocNow) project. It grew out of the events at Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown. The DocNow project seeks to chronicle social media for historically significant events and serves as a means of perserving digital content that is of interest to scholars, students, and archivists.
The site is worth exploring. Jules states that the “public use of social media platforms to document events of historical significance and to engage in political conversations” defines the status quo. Such openness also presents opportunities for authorities to “weaponize platforms in ways that cause harm to marginalized and already vulnerable communities.” He noted that as libraries build archives of social media, they should be aware that there are others using the data for potentially unintended purposes, such as institutions that may use the information to digitally target blacks and other communities of color, or police who have been known to use location-based analytics archive data to prosecute protesters.
