About this Event
When does a pandemic end? Bounding COVID-19 through rapid response collecting
During the spring of 2020, in the early months of COVID-19 lockdowns in the United States, popular press outlets discussed how digital documentation would provide a robust record of the pandemic. Articles detailed how numerous archival groups were rallying resources to aggregate diverse digital media–from websites to user-submitted photos–that could one day provide a historical record of that unprecedented moment.
These archival practices can be characterized as “rapid response collecting,” a methodology used by information and history institutions to collect “material culture from major events as the phenomenon unfolds or in the immediate aftermath” (Debono, 2021). However, unlike other American crises for which rapid response collecting had been employed–whether September 11th, 2001, or the Boston Marathon bombings of 2013– COVID-19 lacked such easily marked temporal boundaries. Instead, the ‘moment’ of COVID-19 addressed in those early articles lasted much beyond the few weeks optimistically projected when lockdowns first began. In the meantime, cultural debates arose over what it meant for the pandemic to end, complicating rapid response collecting’s promise to aggregate materials during or immediately after a significant event.
This talk addresses the cultural ambiguity around the end of the pandemic in the context of rapid response collecting. Through interviews with archivists, librarians and other information professionals who engaged in digital collecting around COVID-19, it reviews how these professionals planned, executed, and ended rapid response collecting around COVID-19; how they grappled with the ambiguous ends of the pandemic through collecting practices; and how these practices may come to shape how COVID-19 is historicized and remembered into the future. The talk offers both theory-driven explorations of how the pandemic has been temporally bounded through the collection of digital media, as well as practical takeaways for collecting documentation as an event unfolds.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Annenberg School for Communication, Walnut Street, Philadelphia, United States
USD 0.00