Should Prince’s Tweets Be in a Museum?

Posted by mdever on July 15, 2016 in digital, digitisation, literary heritage, media, Publication, social media, Twitter

In an article in The Atlantic (5 July 2016), Sonia Weiser questions whether there is value in preserving records of artists’ and writers’ social media activity.

She writes: “Archivists are figuring out which pieces of artists’ digital lives to preserve alongside letters, sketchbooks, and scribbled-on napkins”.

“Should famous artists’ social-media profiles be saved? Archiving their digital materials would follow the tradition of old-school paper archives, the ones that are responsible for maintaining collections like hundreds of Emily Dickinson’s letters, notes from Mary Shelley that show her succumbing to a brain tumor, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s working drafts and photographs. If journals, sketchbooks, letters, and scribbled-on napkins are venerated and kept for insights into great minds, there seems to be a case that tweets should be held onto, too. Then again, publicly accessible 140-character bursts can be so frivolous—and based so much on maintaining appearances—that they might seem like they don’t offer anything worth preserving.”

Read the full article.