What democracy looks like: crowd-collecting protest materials

Abstract

ABSTRACT Mass political protests have emerged as a persistent theme in the presidency of Donald Trump, among them, the 300+ Women’s Marches that occurred worldwide on 21 January 2017. Collecting by curatorial staff at protests is an existing, although sometimes controversial, practice. However, in the era of social media, crowd-collecting has also become common practice. This Forum article summarizes the history and practice in museums and identity-based archives and proposes protocols for documenting artifacts acquired by protest participants.