As social media platforms age, change and become inaccessible through their proprietary interfaces, web archives emerge as one way through which social media data can continue to be accessed, analysed and studied. Over the past 30 years of activity, many archivists and academics have written about the compounding challenges to accessing and preserving constantly changing – and ephemeral – digital material. As the web has shifted from websites to platforms, archiving initiatives and institutions have followed, attempting to keep up with changes to dynamic formats and content. In academic work on archives, the question of how to continuously access, and provide continuous access to, social media data and platforms is often addressed. What is less often addressed are the temporal politics embedded in these archival practices. This paper presents a theoretical analysis of four dominant modes of archiving: crawls, streams, rescues and documentation, that together represent the main mechanisms through which platformed data is extracted. I argue that by examining not just how archives are made, but when , we can unveil the temporal politics of archiving platformed community and the subsequent production of platform(ed) archives. In particular, this paper demonstrates how these four dominant archival temporalities differently interact with platforms, producing and forming the ways that communities and platform power can be seen in the future.
Katie Mackinnon (Fri,) studied this question.