Any Twitter user knows that something is lost when tweets are separated from Twitter: the social part of social media. How might we recover or document the ways that tweets originally appeared online, not just how many "likes" and retweets they garnered, but by whom? How were they interlinked with other content and replied to, trending and streamed in the moment by Twitter's algorithms?
Media, Culture, and Communication Professor Lisa Gitelman places Trump's twitter ban in the larger context of difficulties historians face with the preservation of evolving media — showing how innovations in communication have long prompted questions about the historical record.