I also want to clarify that I used Iran as the touchstone or example or catalyst because of its immediacy and the widespread use of social media in the events that have emerged, but I’m interested in discussing a larger process by which social media materials might be archived/preserved/analyzed related to any of a variety of significant events (certainly China, Burma, etc., but also events in & about the US).

Nicholas’s example points to the need to figure out a way to capture/replicate/analyze at least some of these intersections of various media. We are no longer at the point where scholars can get away with focusing on one form of media (say newspapers or TV) to get a picture of what’s going on. So how can future scholars write about the complex, multimodal context of that interchange Nicholas cites?

[Hope you can make it Nicholas.]

The digital archive might actually be the way to lead into those interfaces in ways that traditional archiving has not been able to do.

Anyway, I hope after all this I can actually get over to THATcamp…bit of a wrinkle this AM…

2) I wonder how this relates to conundrum of disappearing “gray material” in the digital age. My wife was faculty in literature, women’s studies, journalism and more. We often talked about how digital storage and word processing had impacted on the objects of traditional study: manuscripts and revisions. There are more artifacts similar to these, but this might be a good starting point.

Jeff, I may be guilty of scope creep with this comment.

You’re absolutely right that the choices made for any such archiving process are themselves inherently political. All the more reason that scholars should be thinking through the process carefully.

Thanks for getting the ball rolling on this topic.