A case for digital squirrels: Using and preserving YouTube for popular culture research

YouTube users around the globe upload 400 hours of content every 60 seconds, a quantity that leads to descriptions of the platform as “the world’s largest archive of moving images.” We look at how the myth of YouTube as an archive arises and evaluate sources that show its shortcomings in this respec...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inFirst Monday Vol. 23; no. 1
Main Authors Mattock, Lindsay Kistler, Theisen, Colleen, Pierce, Jennifer Burek
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Chicago University of Illinois at Chicago Library 01.01.2018
Subjects
Archives & records
Popular culture
Web sites
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Summary:YouTube users around the globe upload 400 hours of content every 60 seconds, a quantity that leads to descriptions of the platform as “the world’s largest archive of moving images.” We look at how the myth of YouTube as an archive arises and evaluate sources that show its shortcomings in this respect. These discussions ground our recommendations for developing new practices for archiving YouTube content to support scholarly research, a recommendation that starts with a squirrel.
ISSN:1396-0466