Archiving the Women’s March

Like many other repositories, the Southern Historical Collection is interested in collecting information about recent local protests in response to national events. We are partnering with the North Carolina Collection to make this happen for the Women’s March that took place on January 21, 2017.

We will be collecting a limited number of items in the following three categories: social media, ephemera (signs, flyers, hats, etc), and images. Because posts and tweets disappear quickly, we are beginning with social media. Stay tuned for information about donating “stuff” and images!

On archiving social media:

Over the last few years, we have turned more of our attention to methods of archiving social media. We can’t capture everything, so we prioritize documenting moments and movements–phenomena that produce dynamic but ephemeral concentrations of information.

This spreadsheet shows the hashtags and social media sites we are capturing and will be updated as needed. Please comment on Facebook or send us an email if you know of any widely-used, location-specific hashtags or pages that we have missed.

We are currently focusing on North Carolina, but we may expand our efforts in keeping with the broader scope of the Southern Historical Collection based on the work of other repositories.

The Southern Historical Collection recognizes that the Women’s March is neither the first nor the last protest of significance. This project allows us to establish a new framework for crowd-sourcing documentation about social activism so that we can be more responsive to future historic efforts.


Follow these links for more information about documenting the Women’s March:

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