Wednesday, April 29, 2020

Answer: The Future Through the Past - Using archival news to see what's next in COVID

Archival newspapers are a great resource... 

... if you can find them... AND if you can understand them.  



I have to admit that I spent a  LOT of time on this Challenge.  It was just a fascinating bit of research.  The more I dug, the more I found.  At this point, I could write a book!  But that's not on the agenda.  Instead, this post is really focused on what I did to find the information, how I did it (and then a little bit about what I found).  


Reading through old news is incredibly illuminating, especially when you're reading about past pandemics--it doesn't get any more fascinating than this.  



1.  Can you find articles from the news archives of 1918 and 1919 that will show us what happened back then, and MORE IMPORTANTLY, give us a clue about what might happen in the months and years ahead? 


Searching in older content requires a bit of thought.  The farther back you go, the more you notice that the way people spoke and wrote in the past is a bit different than the way we do now.  

Here's an article from the LA Herald (Jan 21, 1919) about the "Sanitary Spartacans" and the "Anti-Mask League" meeting to raise money to fight the mask-wearing ordinance.  I just found this while searching through a news archive, searching for "San Francisco" and "Spanish flu."  


LA Herald (Jan 21, 1919)


Orienting with a timeline:  

To begin, I noticed that NPR commentator Tim Mak wrote a truly remarkable (and lengthy) blog post about the parallels between the COVID-19 pandemic and the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918.  This is a great source of ideas, but more importantly--it points out that a timeline and current historical documents are an incredibly useful thing to have as a way to structure our search into the archives.  Let's look for some other timelines:  

     [ timeline Spanish flu ] 

Yields a lot of timelines.  A really interesting timeline came from the American College of Emergency Physicians, which contains this bit about the end of the pandemic: 


Nov. 21, 1918.  Sirens sound in San Francisco announcing that it is safe for everyone to remove their face masks. 
Dec. 1918.  5,000 new cases of influenza are reported in San Francisco. 
Jan. 1919.  Schools reopen in Seattle. 
March 1919.  This is the first month that no influenza deaths are reported in Seattle.

Obviously, San Francisco made a huge mistake in declaring the Spanish Flu to be over.  

In looking at the CDC's timeline, we learn that: 


March 1918.  First wave of Spanish flu in the US  
Sept-Nov 1918.  Second wave of flu (somewhat more lethal)  
January, 1919.   A third wave of influenza, subsiding by summer, primarily in Europe 
January, 1919.  San Francisco: 1,800 flu cases and 101 deaths are reported in first five days. Many San Antonio citizens complain that new flu cases aren’t being reported.  

It's easy to search for current historic documents with a search like: 

     [ history of 1918 flu ] 

A search like this gives lots of articles.  (Example:  Washington Post, "To save lives, social distancing must continue longer than we expect: The lessons of the 1918 flu pandemic" which points out that cities such as Denver had a second wave of flu illnesses in December, 1918, rolling into January and winding down by late spring.  



More to the point, for our purposes, these kinds of timelines and retrospective articles give us some dates, language, and ideas to search for in our archival newspaper search.  


Finding Newspaper Archives: 

Obviously, you'll need to first figure out how to access and search through news archives.  (See my earlier SRS post about this:  Online News Archives and another one for some tips about how to do this.)  The simplest way is to search for: 


     [ list of newspaper archives ] 

which will quickly take you to the great Wikipedia list of digitized newspapers that covers the US and many other countries.  

From that list I mostly chose to use the Library of Congress Chronicling America site, and the California Digital Newspaper Collection.  Both have extensive collections and cover the years 1918/1919. (For backup, of course I'd check the Google News Archive.  That archive has a very different set of sources that either Chronicling America or the CDL.)  

In addition, I know about and use the commercial site Newspapers.com, which has a really marvelous search interface (and their display interface is, without question, the best in the business).  It costs real money, but some public libraries offer access (through their web portal), and many (nearly all?) university libraries have access to them as well.  This is yet-another reason to hang onto your university/college library account for as long as they'll let you!  

In all cases, you probably will want to use the the advanced search interfaces.  They give you a LOT more control over what you're searching for.  Here's the LOC's advanced search interface.  



Note that you can select the newspapers, or all papers in a state, give a date range, and specify your search with ANY (that is, OR), with ALL of the terms, or with a phrase (that is, like a double-quoted Google search).  


Finding great search  terms:  

As noted, the language of 1918-1919 is a little different than what we use today.  The trick here will be to find the right search terms that will let you discover the major events of the pandemic, and what we should look forward to.  Off the top of my head, I wasn't sure what to search for to get into this topic.  It's useful just to start reading some articles and begin taking notes about terms you find.  


I'm a real advocate for notetaking as you do your research, and in this case, I just created a Google doc and poured lots of thoughts, links, and ideas into it.  That becomes my "notes bucket."  In particular, I'm taking notes on the terms and language used at the time. (Here's my example of a notes bucket about Spanish Flu.)  
This means that you'll be able to focus your research questions as you read along.  Some special terms from that time are:  "Anti-Mask League" "sanitarian" "Public Health Board" and so on.  (See the notes for more.)  


Let's look at some of the questions that I asked:  


a. How did your nation recover from the economic downturn caused by the Spanish Flu?  What articles can you find that tell us what to look for?  

This turned out to be a rather difficult question to answer!  World War 1 had been raging since 1914 and ended on November 11, 1918... which tangles up economic recovery from the war with economic recovery from all of the Spanish flu misery.  (I tried various queries, but it's a real confusion of results.  This is probably better answered by more recent economic analysis such as that of  Sergio Correia, Stephan Luck, and Emil Verner (from the US Federal Reserve) who write that: 

 “While non-pharmaceutical interventions [e.g. social distancing, slowing contact rates, etc.] lower economic activity, they can solve coordination problems associated with fighting disease transmission and mitigate the pandemic-related economic disruption...  ” 

They go on to say that the increase in mortality from the 1918 pandemic (relative to 1917 mortality levels, which was 416 per 100,000) suggests a 23 percent fall in manufacturing employment, and a 1.5 percentage point reduction in manufacturing employment to population. 

In other words, a big outbreak spelled economic disaster for affected cities. But they found that the introduction of social distancing policies is also associated with positive outcomes in terms of manufacturing employment and output. Cities with faster introductions of these social distancing and mask policies had 4 percent higher employment after the pandemic, while ones with longer durations had 6 percent higher employment after the disaster.  That's a huge surprise. 

In other words, social distancing measures that save lives can also, in the end, soften the economic disruption of a pandemic.

The takeaway is clear: These policies not only led to better health outcomes, they in turn led to better economic outcomes. Pandemics are very bad for the economy, and stopping them is good for the economy.


But... I couldn't find this easily in the archival news.  It's only with the distance of time that these results became evident.  Sometimes, you just have to wait for history to catch up.  




b. How well did the protests against mask measures work out?  Were the protesters successful?  What happened to the number of flu cases after people stopped wearing masks?  

 On the other hand, this was a straightforward Research Question to answer.  We already found the "Anti-Mask League" which appears in multiple newspaper accounts in early 1919, as well as the proceedings of the Board of Supervisors for San Francisco, January 1919.  Here, the Anti-Mask league petitions for relief from "the burdensome provisions of this measure."  



Note how similar the argument is between then and now.  ".. it was not in keeping with the spirit of a truly democratic people to compel people to wear the mask that do not believe in its efficacy..."  

Using a special term (like "Anti-Mask") works well.  But I also found good results by date-restricting my archives searches to 1918-1919 and doing searches like: 

     [ "Spanish influenza" mask protest ]

The bottom line here is that protests about wearing masks was fairly common.  As we're seeing today, people hated wearing masks.  Police enforced mask-wearing (at least in San Francisco), but it was always a tense and difficult situation, even though then, as now, it's clear that masks really do help suppress the spread of the infection.  


San Francisco Examiner, Jan 20, 1919

San Francisco Chronicle, Nov 2, 1918


Interestingly, one of the things I picked up in this search is that not all of the news archives are equal in coverage or scope!  

For this search, there were no hits in the California News repository, but over 100 in the Library of Congress collection, and over 30 in the Google News Archives.  Moral here--for complete coverage, you have to check multiple sources with variations on your query to make sure you find what you seek.  



c. Was the course of the Spanish Flu pretty simple, or was it (as some have predicted about COVID), fairly up-and-down for quite a while after the initial outbreak? 

Searching for orders imposing masks or limiting movement wasn't hard, but it was  a bit tedious.  With a search like: 

     [ "Spanish influenza" health board orders ] 

it was easy to find when bans were imposed, but finding the removal of the orders was tricky.  Often, a search like: 


     [ "Spanish infuenza" lifted OR removed
            orders health  board ] 


would find the lifting of a ban that was issued by the local health board, but it was a little hit-or-miss.  I could FIND them, but it was quite a bit of clicking and looking around to find a ban's imposition and then removal... and then re-imposition, and re-removal... 


Here's one example:  




In this case, the article tells us that it was imposed on Oct 7, and then lifted on December 18, 1918.  (And yes, the mayor had to reimpose the ban in early 1919.)  


d. Why did the Spanish Flu finally go away?  (Or did it?)  Did someone develop a vaccine for it, or why did it stop being a pandemic?  
This was a hard one.  It was like looking for a non-event.  The best approach here was to search for articles that were retrospective articles.  That is, there's little point in looking for the end of something when you're not sure if the end has happened yet!  

Apparently, the Spanish flu just vanished. In the archival record there's a diminishing of articles over time, but no clear "The End!" articles were written.  

Wikipedia helpfully tells us that "...Another theory holds that the 1918 virus mutated extremely rapidly to a less lethal strain. This is a common occurrence with influenza viruses: there is a tendency for pathogenic viruses to become less lethal with time, as the hosts of more dangerous strains tend to die out."  

This is a lesson too... It's hard to look for the absence of something, or the unclear and uncertain ending of an ongoing event... Like the end of the flu.  


Search Lessons 


There are many here:   

1. Timelines are great to orient you and give you times / topics to search for. This is good advice anytime you start doing research on a particular topic.  Get a headstart by looking for something that organizes the events and times you're looking for... And mine it for key terms, names, and phrases.  

2.  You need to use multiple online archives.  In this case I used 4 different archives (Library of Congress, California Digital News, Google News Archives, and Newspapers.com).  A careful researcher will want to cross-check over multiple collections.  No one resource has it all!  

3. Different archives have very different search capabilities.  Some don't have a good advanced search function (the ability to filter metadata such as "state of publication"), although all offer date limits.  Some handle double quotes correctly, others are a bit lax in their interpretation.  It's usually worth spending a little time figuring out how this particular archival search actually works.  

4.  Sometimes the original source material is too close to the events of the time for good archival search.  Figuring out the economic effects of the pandemic isn't something that's written about a lot at the time, but can be figured out much later, when researchers can synthesize data from multiple sources over a longer period of time.  


5. News archival search isn't easy or fast.  Settle in and enjoy the searching because it takes time to mine the past.  

6.  Learn the terms of the past.  As you see in the above examples, you sometimes need to pick up specialized terms that you might not use in everyday life today.  (I never use the term "Health Board," although it's a very useful term when searching for medical events in the early 20th century!)  



I hope this was useful...  Knowing these lessons will definitely be handy when you next do an archival news search! 


Search on!  

Wednesday, April 22, 2020

SearchResearch Challenge (4/22/20): The Future Through the Past - Using archival news to see what's next in COVID


The most undervalued resource on the internet... 

... is probably the archive of newspapers.  




Reading through old news is incredibly illuminating of our own time.  You can, in many cases, see the Future Through the Past. 

As someone wise said, "History does not repeat, but it does rhyme."  You see that in a news headline like this one from the Long Beach Press paper of 1919.  



Which looks very much like news that we're seeing today.  




NPR commentator Tim Mak wrote a truly remarkable (and lengthy) blog post about the parallels between the COVID-19 pandemic and the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918.  

This made me start thinking that there's an interesting SRS Challenge here.  And here it is... 

1.  Can you find articles from the news archives of 1918 and 1919 that will show us what happened back then, and MORE IMPORTANTLY, give us a clue about what might happen in the months and years ahead? 

That is, can we see the Future Through the Past? 

Obviously, you'll need to first figure out how to access and search through news archives.  (See my earlier SRS post about this:  Online News Archives and another one for some tips about how to do this.)  

The trick here will be to find the right search terms that will let you discover the major events of the pandemic, and what we should look forward to.  Off the top of my head, I'm not sure what to search for to get into this topic.  

This means that you'll have to clarify your research questions as you read along.  For example, in the above example, the phrase "Anti-Mask League" is a promising lead.  A clarifying question might be: What happened to the League?  


You'll also have to figure out what questions you might like to see answered about the future course of COVID.  Here are some thoughts: 


a. How did your nation recover from the economic downturn caused by the Spanish Flu?  What articles can you find that tell us what to look for?  
b. How well did the protests against mask measures work out?  Were the protesters successful?  What happened to the number of flu cases after people stopped wearing masks?  
c. Was the course of the Spanish Flu pretty simple, or was it (as some have predicted about COVID), fairly up-and-down for quite a while after the initial outbreak? 
d. Why did the Spanish Flu finally go away?  (Or did it?)  Did someone develop a vaccine for it, or why did it stop being a pandemic?  


I'm looking forward to our discoveries!  

Be sure to say WHAT your question is (be clear about what you're searching for), then tell us HOW you found it (what online news archive did you use), and what your ANSWER/DISCOVERY is.  


And, as Jon points out in the comments, I'm really interested in what you find in the news archives of your country (or state, or province, or parish).  

Forward... into the past!  

Search on!  




Wednesday, April 15, 2020

Answer: What are the names?


This one was pure fun... 


Names (for things, people, places, songs, continents, concepts) are important!  

The Challenge for this week was to identify a few names that might not be what you think!  

These weren't especially difficult, but they bring up a really good point: A name might not be what you think it is.  It's worth doing just a bit more digging.  For instance... 


1. Who is Allison Guyot?  Why this is a memorable name?  What does Allison Guyot look like? 

The query:   

     [ Allison Guyot ] 

quickly leads us to the Wikipedia article, telling us that Allison Guyot is a tablemount (that is, a guyot) in the underwater Mid-Pacific Mountains of the Pacific Ocean.  This particular guyot is west of Hawaii and northeast of the Marshall Islands.  At the time of its formation, the atoll (from which this came) was located in the Southern Hemisphere and tectonically drifted to its current position.  

It's a memorable name because it looks like someone's regular name; I could imagine meeting Allison Guyot and saying hi.  

But in fact it's a submerged, truncated mountaintop that's named for E.C. Allison, an oceanographer and paleontologist at San Diego State College, California.  

I couldn't find any good images of Allison Guyot, but I did find a generic image of a guyot on the Wikipedia page for guyot:  



And, by checking Google Scholar, I was able to find many articles about Allison Guyot (especially about the tiny fossils found there).  This article by Edward Winterer (et al.) included a great cross-section image of Allison Guyot as seen by sonar, way out in the deep waters of the Pacific Northwest.  

p/c Winterer, et al. (see link below) 


Winterer, Edward L., and Christopher V. Metzler. "Origin and subsidence of guyots in Mid‐Pacific Mountains." Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth 89.B12 (1984): 9969-9979.


2. Who is Franklin Dixon? 

Again, not hard, but I didn't know that Franklin W. Dixon is the pen name used by a variety of different authors  who wrote The Hardy Boys novels for the Edward Stratemeyer Syndicate, as well as for the Ted Scott Flying Stories series published by Grosset & Dunlap.

Charles Leslie McFarlane, a Canadian author, was the originator of the series.  He wrote 19 of the first 25 books in the series.

The books sell more than a million copies each year, and several new volumes are added to the list each year.  The tales have been translated into more than 25  languages.



3. Who wrote the Nancy Drew mysteries?

My query was: 

     [ author of Nancy Drew books ] 

Aha!  I did not know that the Nancy Drew books were ALSO created by publisher Edward Stratemeyer as the female counterpart to the Hardy Boys series.  Mildred Wirt Benson (July 10, 1905–May 28, 2002) was the original Carolyn Keene, writing 23 of the original series, beginning #1, The Secret of the Old Clock.

Like the Hardy Boy series, the Nancy Drew books are incredibly popular (translated into 45 languages). And, under the direction of Stratemeyer, the books are ghostwritten by a number of authors and published under the collective pseudonym Carolyn Keene.  

So who was Stratemeyer?  How did he come to be the director of such successful series? 

Do the obvious search, and I learn that Edward L. Stratemeyer (October 4, 1862 – May 10, 1930) was an American publisher and writer of children's fiction. 

In addition, he was one of the most prolific writers in the world, producing more than 1,300 books himself, with sales exceeding 500 million copies. 

He also created well-known fictional series for young adults, including The Rover Boys, The Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift, The Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew series.  




4. What is the name of this symbol?     ÷ 
      (yes, I know it’s the division symbol… what’s the REAL name of it?)

All I did was the query: 

     [ ÷ ]  

(Yes... you can query just single characters!) 

I found that it's the symbol for division, properly named the obelus.  

Using this character to represent division, though common, is not universally recommended: the ISO 80000-2 standard for mathematical notation recommends only the solidus (/) or fraction bar for division, or the colon for ratios; it says that this symbol "should not be used" for division.


5. What's the name of this other symbol?  Ꮬ

I included this character because it's still a surprise to some searchers that you can search for special characters.  In this case, it's a letter of the Cherokee syllabary, transcribed as syllable dla.

You could also find this character by drawing it in Google Docs (as I discussed in SRS Aug 28, 2014, which showed how to draw the symbol for recognition, as well as ShapeCatcher.com, which does the same thing).  

Remmij pointed out another online charater reco app at Mausr.com.  These are all great.  (And if one doesn't work for you, try another... or brush up on your drawing skills.)  


6.  How about THIS character?  ⌘

Doing a search for this character leads you into a fascinating rabbithole of discovery.  Most internet denizens recognize it as Apple's command key symbol, but it's also called the looped square, and is commonly used throughout Scandinavia (and a bit beyond) on road signs to indicate places of historical or cultural interest.  

Somewhere in Sweden near a point of interest.

But since it's ALSO used on Macintosh keyboards, the character has accreted a few other terms as well.  If you're looking for this character in a computing (specifically an Apple/Mac context), you might want to know that some people also call this the Command key (⌘),  the Apple key, clover key, open-Apple key, splat, pretzel, drone (rare), or propeller.  

You can also find this called a Bowen knot.  

One symbol, but 10 different terms.  

6. What’s the difference between these two characters:     

                        /             \

We already saw that the right-leaning slash (the first character) is called the solidus, commonly representing division.  Let's not stop there--let's do the search: 

     [ / ] 

Oddly, this doesn't do a search for the character if you do your search from the ADDRESS bar on the Chrome and Firefox browsers it shows a listing of your computer's file system.  If you do this on Safari, it shows you what you'd expect.  

IF, on the other hand, you do your Google query from the good old query box, you'll get what you expect--the results.  Take note:  The address bar in your browser might give very different results!  (This doesn't happen often, but a few things like this crop up from time to time.)  



From this search we see that this character is called a slash (the most common name), but also known as a stroke, virgule, diagonal, right-leaning stroke, oblique dash, solidus, slant, separatrix, forward slash.  I also learned that there are three different kinds of the slash character, each specialized for different typesetting needs.  


Fascinating.  

But what about the left-leaning slash (the second character)?  

Doing the same search (although with the \ character) tells us that it is sometimes called a backslash, a hack, a whack, an escape (from C/UNIX), reverse slash, slosh, downwhack, backslant, backwhack, bash, reverse slant, and reversed virgule.. and sometimes even a reversed solidus.  


SearchResearch Lessons


1. Careful with certain special queries!  As we see, the query [ / ] produces unexpected results IF you do it in the address bar.  Another one to be careful about is "chrome"... which has all kinds of alternative completions.  So... if you see something odd / interesting, try it in the other search box.  

2. Check the meaning (and names) of things you think you already know.  We've talked about this before, but making sure you know what something is (or what it means) AND learning other ways of describing that thing--that's a valuable habit to pick up.  


I hope you enjoyed this fun/easy SearchResearch Challenge.



AND.. a special announcement:  I started up a new YouTube channel.  You might find Search Education to be an interesting thing to subscribe to...  


I've pushed a few short videos there (as advertised a couple of posts ago).  If you subscribe, you'll be the first to see the videos!  


Search on!