How are historians recording and preserving the COVID-19 pandemic?

1

Tropy

This question gets into some of my expertise that isn’t usually showcased on Reddit since you’re really getting into a methodology question. To start off, digital humanities is a field and methodology with digital history as a subset of that, and both are known colloquially as DH. (The boundary between DH and DH is blurry and has its own discussions that can go along with it.) DH has undergone several phases. Phases doesn't mean a type of project becomes outdated or historians drop that method, its more in reference to they kinds of projects historians are starting to develop for our discipline and what's new. In the early days, a digital historian could digitize resources and put them on a website and be on the cutting edge. Phase two added more interpretation and interaction like online exhibits. Phase three brought more tools and methods into historical work- podcasts, network analysis, mapping, etc. The next phase is expanding into multimedia projects, critical studies of the digital, and even AR/VR. Historians are even teaming up with programmers and computer scientists to create tools for doing research. See “Interchange: The Promise of Digital History” in The Journal of American History (Sept. 2008) where Steven Mintz talks about this progression in a conversation with several DHers for more.

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2

Omeka

If you Google "COVID-19 digital archive" you can also find a range of projects with different focuses. A benefit of technology is that now many organizations can create their own Omeka site and build a collection to document events in real time. However, I hope the post above demonstrates that while anyone can, any historian utilizing these various resources need to consider the practices undertaken to gather digital archives. We would never enter a physical archive and look at paper documents without questioning why those survive, what's missing, and thinking about voices specifically left out. A digital collection is the same, however they present an abundance of sources that can distract or distort- approaching the surviving records of the Salem Witch Trials is different from approaching a collection of 40,000 personal accounts. What voices might not volunteer a personal account to a website if it requires identifying information? How many images of people in masks at the grocery store do we need to deliberately save? These are not substantially different questions from what past historians and archivists thought about, but technology does reframe discussion. We'll see how many of these projects were developed with sustainability in mind.

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3

Archive.org

Digital collections started in those early days, and you can see how digital historians changed this work overtime with the examples I'll link to later. Your post notes the crucial problem with these collections- digital things change or disappear, and we are overwhelmed with the amount of digital things to collect. Roy Rosenzweig's landmark essay "Scarcity of Abundance? Preserving the Past" tackles this question. What happens to content hidden behind paywalls or the array of copyrights to navigate? How do you save digital things- a floppy disk, a USB, the Cloud? Will all that physical infrastructure survive, or can you guarantee the parts to fix a CD reader for the next hundred years? How long can the Internet Archive actually last? Are personal documents on an old laptop going to make their way to an archive like 18th century diaries have? Even beyond these questions, the impulse is to save it all, but the nature of archival work is to be selective: how do historians and archivists negotiate this tension? No one has the answers to all these questions yet, but you can check out The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation by Trevor Owens and History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web is Transforming Historical Research by Ian Milligan to learn more about this problem and how historians are facing it.

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