SearchResearch Challenge (5/6/20): Extramusical sounds that people make during performances?

As you know, I love music... 

... that's not a surprise.  

What might be a surprise is that I used to NOT understand why some people would make noises while the musical performance is going on.  

I don't mean babies crying (that's what babies do), or people unwrapping their lozenges in the concert hall (better that than coughing).  What I've always found surprising are the: 

       extramusical sounds and yells 

that happen during a performance.  

For example, if you've ever been to a mariachi performance, you might have heard one of these "ay yi yi yi" cries ring out during the song.  

Pedro Infante doing a grito in performance  

A grito is a common Mexican interjection (typically at loud volume during a song), used as an expression of joy, sadness, or excitement.  Even though it's not part of the music, it IS a part of the performance!  

Once I learned this about gritos, I became much more understanding about these sounds (and non-traditional sounds in general).  

Here's what a grito sounds like (skip to 00:20:00).  

You can learn how to do a grito by looking at this quick tutorial on how to do it (skip to 00:26:00).  

Today's Challenge isn't to find out more about gritos (they're cool and everything, but now you know about them)... the Challenge is broader than that.  

1.  Can you find examples of other outcries / sounds / shouts that are analogous to a grito.  That is, they are (in some sense) outside-of-the-music--that is, extramusical.  

I can think of a couple of examples of sounds like in other countries' traditional music (maybe you can too).  The real question for this week is How can you search for something like this that's so... difficult to describe?

As always, let us know what you discover.  But even more importantly, tell us HOW you found it.  This is a bit tricky, so your solution process will be super interesting to us all. 

Leave your answer in the comments. 

Search on!  

Comment on... The Future Through the Past - Using archival news to see what's next in COVID

As soon as I clicked "Publish" I realized I'd forgotten to... 

... add in some of the good stuff in my notes file.  

IN PARTICULAR... If you recall, a big part of the point of this week's Challenge was to find similarities between COVID and the Spanish flu, and by looking at the similarities (and differences) to figure out if there was  something we might extrapolate from then to now.  ("The Future Through the Past," in a phrase.)  

So here's a little addendum listing a few of the points of commonality I found, and a bit of what this might portend.  

* Opening back up too soon.. 

In 1918 there were huge pressures to open up cities and counties that had been under the Spanish Influenza "social distancing" (stay-at-home) orders.  Just as now, people protested that the lockdowns were hurting the economy and destroying livelihoods.  

San Francisco Chronicle, Nov 2, 1918

And, just as the epidemiologists are predicting for states that relax on social-distancing measures too soon for COVID-19, cities in late 1918 and early 1919 had second and 3rd waves of the flu.  

In a beautiful piece of work, the National Geographic published the curves for many cities in the US (collecting the data after 100 years).  The bottom of the dip after the first peak is around Jan 1, 1919.  You can see what relaxing the measures too soon did... 

P/C National Geographic, 2020.  

* Belief in strange / magical cures...  

For instance, here are a few beliefs from 1918 that could be easily matched with magical beliefs in 2020... 

Does rain destroy the flu?

Some folks believed the flu could be eradicated by “atmospheric conditions.” That is, the disease could be strongly affected by rain.  “...as a result, the deadly influenza germs have probably been completely eliminated in this part of the country.” Los Angeles Herald, V. XLIII, N 283, 28 September 1918

Camphor (a potent smelling oil or waxy substance) could used as a way to ward off flu.

Boys with bags of  camphor around their necks as a flu repellent. (1918)

There was a run on camphor large enough for the chemical and pharmaceutical businesses to take note.  

And, just as in our COVID days, there was a widespread belief that a quinine compound could be a cure for the Spanish flu: 

Flu quinine pills - Lawrence Journal-World, Nov 16 1918.

 Perhaps disinfectants and germicides will work when taken internally. In a remarkable insight, Professor Wilson seems to have discovered the value of "the most powerful antiseptics and germicides" on the Spanish flu. (It's interesting that he's described as "head of the pharmacy department of one of the leading educational institutions of the country." Why not just tell the reader the name of that institution?)

Los Angeles Times, 20 Nov 1918.

Fresh air cures the Spanish flu?

The Times (of Shreveport, LA) Jan 31, 1919

* Conspiracy theories were many ... 

As with the purported beginnings of COVID-19 in China, there were widespread claims the Germans (the antagonists of World War 1, which was raging at the time) spread the disease and that Bayer aspirin was the carrier of Spanish influenza.

The rumor was that “...the aspirin tablets contain influenza germs and some slow poison,” according to the New York City Weekly Bulletin of the Department of Health (Oct 19, 1918) . This caused the Health Department to conduct laboratory tests of aspirin purchased randomly from locations throughout the City.

Nothing was ever found, however, but Bayer was moved to invest heavily in advertising ensuring that buyers had a favorable impression of their product. Not only was Bayer Aspirin a good product, but it's a "100% American Concern."

Not understanding the disease... 

  
And so there were attempts to develop an early proto-vaccine (which they called a serum) that was largely based on the extracts of people who had survived the disease. 

San Francisco Examiner, Oct 29, 1918

Even in 1918, treating people with “grippe serum” or “plasma donation” (in 2020) is an attempt to capture antibodies in the blood of people who survived the flu.  Medical technology of 1918/1919 wasn't sure what caused the flu, but they knew that transfusions of serum could help in some cases. (NYTimes article on plasma donations in 2020.)

And it was really unclear WHAT was causing the flu. Was it the bacterium Influenzae bacillus as some thought? There were contradictory answers (this is a compilation of possible causes):

Casper Star-Tribune (Apr 23, 1919) 

Some populations hit harder than others

In 1918, Navajo country was hard hit with high rates of mortality (American Indian Quarterly, 2014)

The St Johns Herald (AZ) Mar 25, 1920

... with indigenous peoples worldwide suffering massive mortality rates. Here's one example:

Common belief: It's just an ordinary flu... nothing special...

“Worry kills more people than the disease itself,” a Chicago public health official was quoted as saying in 1918.  “The so-called Spanish influenza is nothing more or less than old fashioned grippe.” Of course, you hear people saying that now about COVID as well.

New Arizona Daily Star, Jan 17, 1919

And... we were tremendously unprepared... 

A report sent to the U.S. Public Health Service described conditions on the front lines of the Spanish flu, 1918.  

"...[Doctors were] overwhelmed with work [and] were handicapped by inadequate transportation and two days behind in making calls; many patients . . . had been sick in bunk houses and tents for several days without nourishment, or medical and nursing attention, the sanitary conditions of the bunk houses were deplorable; the mess halls were grossly unsanitary and their operation much hampered by the lack of help; the existing hospitals were greatly overcrowded with patients; and patients were waiting in line several hours for dispensary treatment, and were greatly delayed in obtaining prescriptions at the pharmacy. The epidemic was so far progressed that the immediate isolation of all cases was impossible."  

And, as we're seeing today, there was limited capacity to handle all the dead bodies, putting office spaces and theatres into service as holding places.    

The News Journal, Wilmington, DE (Oct 15, 1918)

The Dayton Herald, OH (Oct 7, 1918) 

In the end...  

The Spanish influenza came, and went, and came back multiple times until finally, by 1920, it was gone.  Nobody really knows why (although there are lots of theories, mostly centered around herd immunity).  

And, oddly enough, there seem to have been no grand summary articles announcing the End of the Spanish Flu.  (At least I couldn't find any.  If you do, please let me know!)   

The articles about Spanish flu just trail off in late 1920, although research continued for a bit, including the finding that (again, echoed in our own time) that cats might carry the disease and transmit it to humans.  

San Francisco Examiner (Dec 11, 1921) 

I think we've made the point: Looking at an analogous past event really can help us anticipate what will happen in the future.  We should have known that (as pointed out above) that people would open up from their social distancing and masking too early, and suffer more upticks in the number of cases.  Or, that people would concoct crazy ideas about what caused and cured the disease.  (No, neither camphor bags or internally applied germicides actually help.)  

There was even one additional SearchResearch Lesson: 

SearchResearch Lesson 

The hardest lesson of all for me to learn was this: 

1.  When you find something while browsing through online archives, MAKE A COPY OF IT!  I can't tell you how many amazing things I found and mentally noted--but did not bookmark or write into my notebook.  This is a huge mistake.  In many cases I was unable to re-find the original citation, even though I was pretty sure I accurately remembered the article.  

Don't expect that your memory of the article will be sufficient to find it again.  Trust me on this.  You wouldn't believe some of the things I found, but then lost in the sands of the archival news repositories.  Don't do that:  If it's good or interesting, capture it while you're there... don't count on re-finding it!   

Hope you found this follow-up note of interest.  I certainly had a good time doing all of this research with you.  

Keep searching!  

Search on!  

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!