Shift Design

Documenting the now is one of our core programs. Funded primarily by the mellon foundation and now in its fourth year, docnow develops tools and builds community practices that support the ethical collection, use, and preservation of social media content. This project is in partnership with the university of Maryland, the university of Virginia, princeton university, and others.

Beginning in 2023 Shift collective will support the archiving the black web (atbw) project on a three and half year 2.5 million investment from the mellon foundation to develop warc school, a web archiving training program for archivists and memory workers at black collecting organizations, a research project that will attempt to map and define the black web, and create several opportunities to increase web archiving collections documenting the black experience.

Historypin is a free-to-use digital platform and engagement methodology now serving the public for over a decade. Designed to share stories around local history in order to strengthen community, the platform has been utilized by over 4,000 cultural organizations around the world. With support from the filecoin foundation for the decentralized web, we are embarking on a research project to examine the ethics and technical requirements of decentralized storage with a focus on the needs of community-based archives.

In november of 2023, we reconvened architecting sustainable futures at five (asf@5), a celebration, assessment, and agenda setting convening for community-based archives, thanks to generous support from the mellon foundation. Five years ago, we convened 40 community-based archives professionals and funders to look at how these organizations could work together for long-term financial sustainability. The findings helped set the stage for increased collaboration and peer networks, important changes in funding transparency, and new and streamlined funding opportunities direct to smaller cultural memory organizations doing critical work in their communities. This year, we'll take the time to look at what's been achieved and look at how we can work together to further this work in the next 5-10 years. We anticipate launching a new and improved version of historypin.org in 2023. One of our core free digital tools, historypin strengthens community through local history and encourages diverse digital storytelling from communities around the world. Thanks to a grant from the national endowment for the humanities office of digital humanities, we've been able to deeply explore user needs and take on the massive project of finding a new platform for a decade-old digital humanities project in use by over four thousand cultural memory organizations around the world. In 2023 we are supporting project stand to host five web archiving workshops for student organizers and activists who are interested in building web archives that can later be used for research, reflection, or activation activities, among other uses. The participating organizations for the workshops are the university of Kentucky, the Ohio state university, university of Maryland, university of Michigan, and the atlanta university center. There is a growing list of tools to archive digital content from the web and social media and these tools are becoming more accessible everyday, allowing many people, including students, to utilize these tools for documentation purposes. We continue our strategic consulting work this year with a number of amazing local and national community memory projects, including the manilatown heritage foundation, and the national indigenous knowledge & language alliance / alliance nationale des connaissances et des langues autochtones.