Historians have always conducted research that defies geography, time, and formats, especially those who study ethnic and transnational populations. Today, people make extensive use of social media both at the communal, as well as the individual level. Out of this use, new forms of primary sources have come forth (tweets, Facebook (either private, or group/community pages), websites, blogs, etc.).

Social media output, abundant, albeit ephemeral, presents issues of curation, preservation, contextualization, and relevance among a sea of data. If memory institutions (archives, libraries, museums), as well as historians, do not take initiatives to preserve and provide semantically relevant access to this material, historians in the future will lack primary sources with which to conduct scholarship about today’s history.

Please send proposals, suggestions, or comments by February 8. Thank you.