Social Archivist

Currently there seems to be surprisingly few books related to the topic of social archiving. The closest I could find was Indie Publishing: How to Design and Produce Your Own Book (2008). My copy recently arrived from Amazon and the book has some excellent tips and some beautiful self-publishing examples.

The most useful parts of the book include short solid design advice (e.g. typography, page layouts) and a nice overview of the entire process of publishing a book – even helpfully explaining all the various mundane parts of the copyright sections in a book. Nothing is covered in-depth (there’s merely a double page spread on InDesign) but it’s a good starting point.

However, there is little specifically relating to how to organize and usefully, beautifully present the type of content we’re all amassing online. I think that this is the biggest issue: how does one present hundreds of photos, tweets, Facebook comments, blog posts, favourite things, events and more in a print format that we will be able to treasure and reminisce over in years to come?

If you have any book suggestions on this topic, please let me know!

Created using Blurb, NEWYORK2IDAHO documents a father and son road trip in April 2009 using tweets from a Blackberry while on the trip to narrate the photos.

Anthony Robertson used Blurb to print a book of Tweets (protected account) called Advice for my son.

In the forward he writes (emphasis mine):

I have thought about this project for some time. I have often wondered what little tidbits of information I should give you. I started to slowly post these 140-character granules of wisdom to Twitter; Twitter acting as a kind of repository of ideas. After several months of accumulation, I started to come up with a plan where the granules would have a bit of longevity.

When I found out I had rheumatoid arthritis and upon turning forty, I knew I wanted some of the ideas I have communicated over the years to stick within your brain.

In March 2009, James Bridle compiled all two years of his tweets into a 270 page hardback book. James thinks he was the first to do it. It looks just like a novel:

The process was quite involved and time consuming. He wrote his own script to pull down all his tweets (although there are plenty of options out there now) and then pulled them into InDesign using another script before printing it with Lulu.

“When Twitter is inevitably replaced by something else, I don’t want to lose all those incidentals, the casual asides, the remarks and responses. That’s all really. This seems like a nice way to do it, and I’ll probably do it again in a couple of years time.” – James

In the comments section of his blog post, Benedict Leigh says:

“The loss of ephemeral daily information about life passing, not for me (or even my children) but for grandchildren is one of the things that worry me about the way I use sites like this.”

In January this year Ben Terrett and Russell Davies printed 1,000 copies of their own newspaper full of things their friends had written on the internet.

The newspaper just contains tweets, blog posts and photos.

On the last page, Ben And Russell say: “2009 feels like a year for printing and making real stuff in the real world. It’s going to be exciting.”

What a fabulous gift to receive!

See more photos over at Flickr.

What’s more, they’re going to make it easier for you to do the same. Check out Newspaper Club.