Jules has received wide attention and has devoted much of his scholarly and professional activity to DocNow, a set of tools for researchers to work with Twitter data and a community of practice to explore these tools' applications. The project was conceived by Jules and Edward Summers during the 2014 Society of American Archivists Conference, which coincided with the shooting of Michael Brown and subsequent protests in Ferguson, Missouri. Meredith Evans also joined the project as a partner. Within six days of the shooting, Summers created a tool to capture and archive tweets referencing the protests. The project garnered some immediate criticism, about privacy, intellectual property, and ethical issues around collecting social media posts, such as whether the collected posts might be used for police surveillance purposes, which has prompted Jules to explore and promote conversations around these issues.