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The Problem of Describing Digital Ephemera
by Brinna Michael 

In the fall of 2019, preparations began to ramp up for Pitts Theology Library’s winter exhibition, 
Thy Kingdom Come: American Evangelicalism from George Whitefield to Contemporary Poli-
tics, an exploration of the historical, social, and political complexities of the American Evangelical 
movement. The goal of curators Brandon Wason and Eric Moore (2019) was to “[problematize] 
monolithic portrayals of evangelicalism in the media in order to demonstrate the significant role 
this movement has played within the broader American culture.” To accomplish this, they drew 
on a variety of resources, including original compendiums of George Whitfield’s sermons, publica-
tions by proponents of Christian fundamentalism, ephemera reflecting the everyday Evangelical 
life, and books on the state of contemporary American Evangelicalism. In addition to these more 
traditional, physical representations of embodied history, Wason and Moore also made the decision 
to include something altogether different for Pitts: a curated selection of tweets to accompany the 
section on American Evangelicalism and Contemporary Politics.

But why tweets? Pitts Theology Library’s Special Collections department specializes in collecting 
a variety of historical materials largely focused on the Reformation and Wesleyan periods, and it 
is rare that exhibitions engage so directly with current events. However, Wason and Moore’s col-
laboration presented an opportunity to display a truly contemporary example of the current state 
of politics and religion, one which could only be captured through social media. Throughout the 
exhibition’s three-month run, Wason, Moore, and Library Director Bo Adams, curated a selection of 
tweets that were added to a running feed in the gallery, giving a near real-time look into the living 
Evangelical experience. In fact, the screen on which the feed was running quickly became the sec-
tion of the exhibition most frequently engaged with by visitors.

In response to the exhibition, some in the Atla community posed the question: amidst cases full 
of painstakingly preserved and described physical materials, were there plans for preserving and 
describing the tweets? The short answer is no. A selection of the tweets were included in the official 
exhibition catalog, but, overall, there was not a plan for any long-term preservation or description 
of the tweets. This decision was made largely because the displayed tweets constituted an incred-
ibly small and highly curated subset of the social media record of Evangelical engagement with 
contemporary politics specifically gathered for this exhibition. Rather than attempting to take on 
a project outside the scope and technical capability of the library, the decision was made not to 
preserve them outside of their context as a supplemental element of the exhibit itself. Additionally, 
the preservation of tweets, and social media posts broadly, is an incredibly complex and imprecise 
process, one that should not be taken on in an ad hoc, one-off fashion. 

 As the technology we use to communicate and express ourselves continues to develop, it 
is becoming quite clear that the cultural heritage community must shift our established practices 
in order to preserve and describe these new forms of cultural communication artifacts. Many are 
familiar with the often-arduous process of describing physical ephemera or other types of obscure 
and challenging information artifacts, but digital ephemera present an even more complex un-
dertaking. Tweets and other types of social media posts exemplify the intricacy of such artifacts: 
interactive by design and ephemeral by nature, it is practically impossible to capture a suitably de-

Brinna Michael is Cataloging and Metadata Librarian at Pitts Theology Library, Emory University.

http://pitts.emory.edu/files/exhibits/evangelicalism2020/index.html
http://pitts.emory.edu/files/exhibits/evangelicalism2020/index.html


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scriptive context of a collection of tweets through the means available to archivists and librarians 
now. 

WHAT IS A TWEET? WE JUST DON’T KNOW

Twitter currently has a very robust selection of application programming interfaces (APIs), which 
enable developers to do everything from create and edit tweets and direct messages to retrieve 
dumps of tweet and public user account metadata in JSON format (Twitter Developer, “Introduc-
tion”). These APIs and associated endpoints (applications which perform a specific function, like 
searching based on a string) were largely designed with business and industry uses in mind, but 
could potentially be adapted for preservation and description. Still, simple access to the data is not 
a success in and of itself. There are a number of challenges that pose a particularly tall barrier to 
any useable process by which to reliably and regularly record and preserve tweets.

The prime example of this is the Library of Congress’ attempt to build a Twitter archive through 
a partnership with Twitter. Beginning in 2010, The Library of Congress and Twitter reached an 
agreement in which Twitter would provide an archive of public tweets from 2006–10 as well as 
establish a continual transfer of tweets on an ongoing basis moving forward. That project abruptly 
stalled, as announced in a white paper by the Library of Congress (2017), which stated that the 
library “will continue to acquire tweets but will do so on a very selective basis” and that those 
tweets will be “thematic and event-based, including events such as elections, or themes of ongoing 
national interest, e.g. public policy.” Since then, almost nothing has been heard from the project. 
Elisabeth Fondren and Meghan Menard McCune (2018), however, provide an excellent analysis 
of the social, technical, and cultural challenges that impacted the Library of Congress’s decision in 
their article, “Archiving and Preserving Social Media at the Library of Congress: Institutional and 
Cultural Challenges to Build a Twitter Archive.”

Based on Fondren and McCune’s observations, let’s break down one aspect of the technical is-
sues facing institutions attempting to preserve Twitter content: the challenge of processing and 
organizing a set of raw data. When a tweet’s data is received from Twitter, either by request for a 
certain account or through an endpoint query, it arrives in the form of metadata encoded in Tweet 
JSON format. This means that the tweets have been stripped all their original visual and interactive 
context, calling into question how we even want to define what a tweet “is.” Is it the 140 (or 280) 
characters composing the “text” element of the “Tweet object” (Twitter Developer, “Tweet Object”)? 
Is it the entire set of metadata enclosed in the “Tweet object” itself? Or does it also include the visual 
rendering of the information as well? This distinction is important when considering the purpose 
of preserving the information artifact and the method of description to be used for providing ac-
cess and context. For example, the tweets collected and displayed as part of the Thy Kingdom Come 
exhibition were displayed as they would be seen as part of a Twitter feed, relying on their inter-
linked visual and textual aspects to engage users in a way that could not be achieved if they were 
displayed as raw data or even as a more standard metadata “record” view.

TO COLLECT OR NOT TO COLLECT

In addition to such technical issues, there are the ethical and social ones. Privacy is a major con-
cern for social media users, although their behaviors may not align with these concerns (Yerby, 



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Koohang, and Paliszkiewicz 2019). As cultural heritage institutions, we have the complicated job 
of trying to balance the responsibility of recording cultural history with respecting the wishes and 
privacy of creators who may not have intended or wished for their content to be preserved long-
term or exposed for research purposes. This is not a new concept. Archives regularly broker access 
restrictions as part of donor agreements, particularly in regards to living creators and potentially 
controversial materials. The same considerations should be given when contemplating preserving 
social media posts:

•  What is the purpose of collecting and preserving these posts?

•  Are we undermining the creators’ privacy and potentially endangering them by col-
lecting and preserving these posts?

•  Are we taking appropriate measures to ethically and accurately describe the full 
context of these posts?

This final question poses perhaps the greatest hurdle to preserving this new wave of digital ephem-
era. As Fondren and McCune (2018, 41) note, “the permanent and long-term nature of the Library’s 
Twitter Archive has challenged the widespread notion of social media as ephemeral content… [and] 
may also alter cultural practices on Twitter, as users react to the knowledge that their tweets are 
now part of history.” If the act of collection could affect established cultural practices surrounding 
social media, how will descriptions and presentation of those collected tweets and posts? Our cur-
rent methods and systems of description, specifically MARC, have historically been built around 
concepts of tangible information artifacts, and have thus struggled to be flexible enough to fully 
contextualize more complex examples of cultural history, such as film, music, performance, physi-
cal ephemera, and unpublished works. It only stands to reason that the same level of ingenuity will 
be called on to fully contextualize something as massive and complex as a social media site.

Additionally, we must remember that the act of curating content being collected by cultural heri-
tage institutions is, in and of itself, a biased act, imposing a particular lens though which cultural 
and public history will be interpreted for generations to come. The proposal by the Library of Con-
gress (2017) Twitter Archive project to further narrow the collecting parameters moving forward 
shifts social media into this conversation of collection bias, reinforcing the need for fully fleshed-
out methods of contextualization as part of preservation and description.

CONCLUSIONS

The inclusion of tweets in Wason and Moore’s exhibition, Thy Kingdom Come, exemplified the 
engaging and dynamic ways in which current and historical methods of cultural communication 
can interact. While no plans were made to preserve or describe the curated tweets, their inclusion 
provokes an important discussion for cultural heritage institutions: how are we going to move for-
ward so that future generations will have full, minimally-biased access to the normalized cultural 
exchanges represented by social media posts and interactions? As with all shifts to the format of 
cultural exchange, there is no simple answer to this question. While technical challenges present a 
very concrete hurdle to this goal, we must also carefully consider the ethical and social impact of 
collecting digital ephemera. Current and widely used methods and standards of description (e.g., 
MARC, Dublin Core, etc.) cannot accurately define and describe the complex relationships and con-



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text of a platform like Twitter. As such, our first goal must be to break free of conventional defini-
tions of information artifacts and clearly answer the question, “What is a tweet?” Until we can 
define with surety what we are describing, we cannot move forward with designing a descriptive 
standard.

WORKS CITED

Fondren, Elizabeth and Meghan Menard McCune. 2018. “Archiving and Preserving Social Media 
at the Library of Congress: Institutional and Cultural Challenges to Build a Twitter Archive.” 
Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture 47, no. 2: 33–44. doi.org/10.1516/ptdc-2018-0011.

Library of Congress. 2017. “Update on the Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress.”

Twitter Developer. “Introduction to Tweet JSON.” Data Dictionary.

———. “Tweet Object.” Data Dictionary.

Wason, Brandon and Eric Moore. 2019. “Introduction.” Thy Kingdom Come: American 
Evangelicalism from George Whitefield to Contemporary Politics.

Yerby, Johnathan, Alex Koohang, and Joanna Paliszkiewicz. 2019. “Social Media Privacy Concerns 
and Risk Beliefs.” Online Journal of Applied Knowledge Management 7, no. 1: 1–13. 
doi.org/10.36965/OJAKM.2019.7(1)1-13.

https://doi.org/10.1516/ptdc-2018-0011
https://doi.org/10.1516/ptdc-2018-0011
https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/files/2017/12/2017dec_twitter_white-paper.pdf
https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/v1/data-dictionary/overview/intro-to-tweet-json
https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/v1/data-dictionary/overview/tweet-object
https://exhibitions.pitts.emory.edu/exhibitions/thy-kingdom-come/
https://doi.org/10.36965/OJAKM.2019.7(1)1-13
https://doi.org/10.36965/OJAKM.2019.7(1)1-13