WRPR 188: Epidemics and Society (HC)

Great for blogs, news, and magazine articles:

Great for both scholarly and popular literature:

COVID-19 Digital Primary Resources 

• Commercial Advertisements
  • “Alaska Safety Dance”: An Advertisement for Alaska Airlines’ COVID Safety Protocols (one of a number of advertisements for airlines and other industries responding to COVID that might be interesting to look at!)
  • “Caregivers”: A pandemic-era clorox ad (one of many such ads for health and sanitary products that might make an interesting primary source).
  • COVID-19 Ads: a collection of work by ad agencies and brands around the subject of COVID-19
• Governmental/Institutional Messaging and Policy
  • City of Berkeley (CA) COVID-19 Posters
  • City of Philadelphia COVID-19 Posters and Educational Materials: on social distancing, masks, educating children about COVID, etc.
  • CDC COVID-19 Communication Resources: CDC resources for communicating with the public about COVID, including short videos, social media campaigns, posters, PSAs, etc.
  • Haverford College: “Be Safe, Friends”: Haverford’s COVID website and dashboard. Could be an interesting source if you were interested in writing about the College’s response to the pandemic!
  • Pennsylvania Covid-19 Documents: An archive of websites pertaining to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's official responses and guidelines for citizens and state agencies during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic.
  • Philadelphia City Council, Public Health Committee, Meeting Transcripts (2020):
  • NYC Department of Health COVID Posters and Flyers: on restaurants, offices, vaccines, social distancing, etc.
• Visual Art
  • Archives of American Art: Pandemic Oral History Project: A collection of oral histories recording responses to the global pandemic across the American art world.
  • Cover the Walls with Hope: A collection of street art and protest posters created by Philadelphia-area artists during the pandemic
  • Covid Chronicles: A print anthology of comics “commenting directly on how individuals, societies, governments, and markets reacted to the worldwide crisis.”
  • Mapping COVID-19 Street Art: A collection of photographs of global street art created during, and reacting to, the pandemic.
• Journalistic and Documentary Coverage
  • #AsianAmCovidStories: A series of short (two-minute) social media documentaries on Asian American voices during the pandemic
  • Southwest Journal’s “Voices from the Pandemic”: A series of personal stories about the coronavirus pandemic recorded in a Minneapolis newspaper.
• Community Archives 
  • Brooklyn Public Library: “Brooklyn COVID-19 Stories”: a collection of oral histories submitted during the COVID-19 pandemic. It includes interviews from a wide variety of community members about how coronavirus and New York City's shutdown has impacted their lives. 
  • COVID-19 Archive, Images and Stories from Vermont: Community-contributed items documenting life in Vermont during the pandemic, collected by the Vermont Historical Society
  • COVID-19 MKE: A collection of community-contributed items documenting how the Milwaukee area experienced the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020.
  • In This Together: Chicago’s Community Response to COVID-19: the Chicago History Museum's community-sourced repository of digital reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic, containing public submissions including journal entries, oral histories, images, recordings, and other materials.
  • A Journal of the Plague Year: An online database of crowd-sourced stories, personal accounts, images, and social media posts about the pandemic.
  • National Nursing United Response to COVID-19. Images and documents relating to this nursing union’s COVID-related protests and labor actions.
  • Northeastern Minnesota COVID-19 Community Archive Project: Materials related to the COVID-19 pandemic as experienced in Northeastern Minnesota, created by individuals, businesses, and organizations. There is also a collection called “Stories of Wisdom from Bodies in Seperation,” a consisting of 110 oral history interviews documenting life under the COVID-19 pandemic in Northeastern Minnesota
  • Queen’s Memory COVID-19 Project: documenting the experiences of Queens (NY) residents during the COVID-19 pandemic
  • “Vaccines and Us”: Cultural Organizations for Community Health. A brand-new resource from the Smithsonian Institution, in collaboration with cultural organizations in communities across the nation, containing resources to help individuals make informed decisions about COVID‑19 vaccines. Contains some potentially very interesting sources for analyzing how public health and community organizations are trying to promote the vaccines with the public, as well as the public concerns they are trying to combat.
• General Sources
  • Global Health Web Events Archive: A selective collection of websites archived by the National Library of Medicine beginning in 2014 related to global health events, including the COVID-19). Included in the archive are websites and social media of government and non-government organizations, journalists, healthcare workers, and scientists in the United States and around the world, with an aim to collect and preserve a diversity of perspectives
  • Social Media: Public social media posts might be a really interesting source to analyze; consider looking on Instagram or Twitter for interesting images or accounts posted under hashtags like #maskup, #covidvaccine, etc.