Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference
"We Losin’ Recipes!”: Building Archives of Black Digital Culture
Meredith Clark, Andre Brock, Zakiya Collier, Kevin Winstead, Kiara Childs

“Remember that time on Twitter…?”

“Yeah, they deleted that Instagram post…”

“I remember this one blog I used to visit; I wish I could still find it…”

“I lost everything when they sold the site…”

Scholars working with digital materials know all too well the frustrations inherent in attempting to save objects and artifacts in order to retrieve them for later examination. We are particularly concerned that important elements of Black digital culture are threatened by our own assumptions about the perpetual availability of online data. Thus, as part of a broader effort to build a series of archives about Black digital culture (think Black Twitter, Black Vine, and Black queer YouTube series), we invite participants to join us for a collective session of praxis on Black digital archival praxis.

This workshop highlights key theories, methodologies, and tools for collaboration to preserve digital artifacts and community vignettes. Using a suite of free tools offered by Documenting the Now, a Mellon-supported initiative designed to assist social activism groups securely collect, catalog, and narrate their own social media experiences, this session will explore a collective approach to transforming born-digital artifacts from the corpora that inform our research into more cohesive and accessible archives that promote a sense of sustainability in the study of Black digital culture.