Introducing: The Zuckerberg Files

Today, after months of hard work by many hands, I’m happy to announce the launch of The Zuckerberg Files, a digital archive of all public utterances of Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. Over 126 full-text transcripts and 60 video files are available for researchers to download, analyze, and scrutinize.

What is The Zuckergberg Files?

The Zuckerberg Files is a digital archive of all public utterances of Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. It includes transcripts and bibliographic data of all publicly-available content representing the voice and words of Zuckerberg, including blog posts, letters to shareholders, media interviews, public appearances and product presentations, and quotes in other sources.

The Zuckerberg Files is hosted on the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee’s Digital Commons, and consists of two digital collections. The “Transcripts” collection include full-text transcriptions of all the content in the digital archive of Zuckerberg’s public statements. The “Videos” collection represents a subset of the collection with archived copies available video files documenting certain Zuckerberg appearances.

Why do we need The Zuckerberg Files?

The dominance of social networking sites, such as Facebook, in contemporary life sparks unique issues of information privacy and the ethics of sharing online. An important step towards addressing these concerns is to gain a better understanding of how Facebook sees its own role in within these debates, and how it frames these privacy and ethical issues within its own discourse. The Zuckerberg Files represents an important step towards understanding, approached through the lens of Mark Zuckerberg’s own language. By gaining a better understanding of how Facebook’s founder and CEO conceives of his own company’s role in the policy and ethical debates surrounding social networking, we will be better suited to critically engage in a dialogue on privacy and Facebook, inform design and policy recommendations, and increase user awareness and literacy.

How can I access The Zuckerberg Files?

The full bibliographic and metadata for The Zuckerberg Files are available to the public here, including valid URLs to the original source material. Access to the full-text transcripts and archived video files has been password-protected in adherence to the “Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Scholarly Research in Communication“. Those wishing to gain access to the full archive should follow the instructions provided here.

Thanks!

The Zuckerberg Files was inspired by a conversation I had with Anthony Hoffmann and Kate Raynes-Goldie at the Internet Research 11.0 conference. It was made possible by the hard work of Jeremy Mauger, Sam Goerke, Anna Jeffries, Ashley Schuett, Dave Bloom, and Anthony Hoffmann, and supported by the UW-Milwaukee Office of Undergraduate Research and the School of Information Studies.