Documenting the Now

CTL-E-6357 · Institution · other · 2016–present

VERIFIED evidence grade — build store (JSON graph)

Combined Graph record U-07543 · provenance: build store (JSON graph), record CTL-E-6357.

Documenting the Now, or DocNow, develops open-source tools and community-centered practices that support the ethical collection, use, and preservation of publicly available content shared on the web and social media. Archivist Bergis Jules and developer Edward Summers conceived it during the 2014 Society of American Archivists conference, which coincided with the shooting of Michael Brown and the protests in Ferguson, Missouri; within two weeks they had collected some 13 million Ferguson-related posts. In 2016, with support from a Mellon Foundation grant, Jules and Summers formed Documenting the Now as a collaboration of the University of Maryland, the University of California, Riverside, and Washington University in St. Louis. Its tools include the DocNow application for appraising, collecting, and gathering consent for social media archives, the DocNow Catalog of tweet datasets, and the Hydrator application. DocNow is now a core program of Shift Collective.

The record

• Also known as: DocNow

Notes

STAGING: temp id EB-13. CORRECTIONS to the candidate brief, carried on the record: (1) 'Founded 2014' conflates conception (2014 SAA conference, Ferguson) with formation — the funded project was formed/established in 2016; the description states both. (2) TweetSets is NOT a DocNow tool (it is a George Washington University Libraries platform) and is not claimed. (3) 'Clayton McCleskey' from the brief was not verified in any source consulted; the white-paper author alongside Jules and Summers is Vernon C. Mitchell Jr. STATISTICS (sourced, dated): $517,000 two-year Mellon grant (UMD Today, 2016); 'some 13 million posts' collected within two weeks (Ferguson, 2014; Mellon Foundation). Current home: Shift Collective (core program), a later status than the original three-university collaboration. CURATOR'S JUDGMENT (DRAFT): DocNow is the packet's consent ethic made software — the Ferguson archive is why Black Twitter (EB-05) can be studied without being strip-mined.

Referenced by

• Black Twitter — related to → this record

Sources

• Mellon Foundation (accessed 2026-10-29): 'In 2016, with support from a Mellon Foundation grant, Jules and Summers formed Documenting the Now. DocNow, as it is called, aims to provide a social media archiving model to serve the needs of archivists and researchers as well as activist content-creators and nonacademic memory workers.'; 'As it happened, Summers had already created a Twitter archiving tool called twarc, which he and Jules began using to gather tweets with Ferguson hashtags and their metadata. Within two weeks, they had collected some 13 million posts.'; 'In 2023, DocNow is directed by Shift Collective, a nonprofit design and consulting group.' (build store)
• SAA (accessed 2026-10-29): 'Established in 2016 as a collaboration of the University of Maryland, University of California at Riverside, and Washington University in St. Louis through a grant from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, DocNow provides user-friendly tools and an ethical framework for the collection and preservation of social media content.' (build store)
• UMD Today (accessed 2026-10-29): 'Making sure that material isn't buried beneath the digital sands of time is the aim of "Documenting the Now," a UMD-affiliated research project supported by a two-year, $517,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.' (build store)
• DocNow (accessed 2026-10-29): 'We are happy to announce the release of the DocNow V1.0, an application for appraising, collecting, and gathering consent for social media archives.' (primary source · build store)
• DocNow Catalog (accessed 2026-10-29): 'The DocNow Catalog is a collectively curated listing of Twitter datasets. Public datasets are shared as Tweet IDs, which can be hydrated back into full datasets using our Hydrator desktop application.' (primary source · build store)
• DocNow site (accessed 2026-10-29): 'Documenting the Now develops open source tools and community-centered practices that support the ethical collection, use, and preservation of publicly available content shared on web and social media.' (primary source · build store)

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Record CTL-E-6357 · Combined Graph record U-07543 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · 6 sources · 1 mapped relationship.
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