Why this exists
Why this archive exists, what it collects, and what it commits to.
A public archive · 1 July 2024 – 5 August 2024, and after
Most of the July Revolution was recorded on platforms that were never built to keep anything. Accounts are deleted, posts are taken down, servers are retired, links rot. Some of this loss is deliberate. Most of it is ordinary and just as final. Either way the result is the same: a country's record of the months that changed it, dissolving a little further every week.
This archive exists to hold that material somewhere it cannot quietly go missing.
We collect the whole record, not only the news.
Photographs and video, yes — but also the articles, the opinion pieces, the poems. What people wrote in those weeks is evidence of the period as much as any photograph is. An archive that keeps only the documentary and discards the literary preserves the events and loses the experience of living through them.
We are building the authoritative copy.
Authority here is not a claim we make; it is a method we follow. Every file is dated and placed. Its origin is recorded — where it was published, when we captured it, what we could confirm and what we could not. Where we are uncertain, the record says so. Where the original has since vanished, the record says that too, and holds what we have.
The order is chronological, and the sequence is the point.
From 1 July onward, day by day. 5 August is the hinge, not the ending — what followed belongs to the same record, and the archive continues past it.
The work is distributed and voluntary.
Archivists, researchers, technologists and translators across several countries, most working in their own time. No government, no party, no organisation directs what is kept here or what is removed.
We expect to be outlasted.
Copies are held in more than one place, under more than one jurisdiction. An archive that can be switched off is not an archive, and an archive assembled to survive deletion should not itself have a single point of failure.
We correct in the open.
Errors are fixed and the correction is dated. If you are named or identifiable in this archive, or you are the family of someone who is, write to us at info@julydiary.com.