Archival newspapers and COVID-19
I've posted cool search tips I've read about on the SearchResearch blog before ("Drag and drop for Google Image Search", "Searching with emojis", and "Some Google Image search tips"), but it's been a while and I'd like to give the blog a shout-out again. Daniel Russell, a senior research scientist at Google and author of The joy of search :a Google insider's guide to going beyond the basics, writes the SearchResearch blog and covers helpful search strategies. The usual format is first a post with a search puzzle which you can try to solve. Blog readers will comment on the challenge post with what they think the answer is and how they found it. Then Daniel writes a post about how one might find the information to solve the challenge.
Recently, he posted this search challenge:
which included this question:
- 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?
He also noted, "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:
- 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?
- 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?
- 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?
- 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?"
You can find the answer to the challenge and additional commentary in these follow-up posts:
- https://searchresearch1.blogspot.com/2020/04/answer-future-through-past-using.html
- http://searchresearch1.blogspot.com/2020/05/comment-on-future-through-past-using.html
They contain some helpful tips for searching archival newspapers, and his research notes for this challenge are a fascinating read. I'd highly recommend the blog challenges if you want to practice your search skills and learn new tricks.