Week 7

Faces of the Movement is a recent daily-release photo project featuring the faces and words of people seeking justice against US police brutality. You can find it here:http://facesofthemvmnt.tumblr.com/

What’s interesting about this project is that it spans across a few mediums: it has Twitter and Instagram accounts posting similar content in addition to its tumblr blog, which appears to be the center of the project. In the case of most branding, a lot of organizations have their main website and a slew of social media accounts through which to reach its audience and draw it back to their company. In the case of this project, the multiple outlets seem united in presenting the same information to a variety of audiences on different mediums, not necessarily persuading followers on Twitter or Instagram back to the tumblr page. That’s what makes this project so different than any promotional campaign, and so unique in its homogeneity and multiplicity.

However, as I said, though the tumblr blog is not essential to the content or experiences produced on the project’s Twitter or Instagram accounts, it does seem central because it’s a standing-alone webpage. So I’ll be talking about the potential for digital humanities projects on the tumblr platform.

If you’ve ever used tumblr, you know it’s known for its almost-instantaneous virality. And because so many different posts are accessible at once and so easily consumable, it’s not exactly difficult for any given post to gain momentum on this platform. This gives way for all sorts of narratives to be disseminated across the platform for audiences to see.

What’s difficult about tumblr is that your collection of posts is only that — a collection — on your blog. Because of the reblogging feature, individual posts often get separated from the entire compilation, which people can only access if they choose to trace back to the origin of a post. If you’re looking for widespread contact, tumblr is a great approach. But if you’re looking to send a distinct, packaged project, tumblr might make it appear disjoint and fragmented across its platform.