Precedents to Documenting COVID-19

Pandemics, Protests, and Disasters

ANna N. DHody: I am the acting codirector and curator of the Mütter Museum and the director of the Mütter Research Institute. The Mütter Museum is part of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, a professional society founded in 1787 and a museum that opened in 1863. It is primarily a medical history museum, but the core of its collection is biological specimens that directly reflect nineteenth-century public health concerns, many of which, of course, were latent infectious diseases—pandemics. The specimens were primarily donated to us by the physicians who were members. The museum is still active. It still collects.

It just so happens that in October 2019, we put up an exhibit called “Spit Spreads Death,” about the 1918 influenza pandemic, with an emphasis on Philadelphia. This was one of our most ambitious and expensive exhibitions, mounted with significant help from external organizations such as the Pew Charitable Trusts. It centers on the fourth Liberty Loan Drive parade, held to raise money for the World War I effort, but also the reason that Philadelphia had the highest death rate per capita from the flu among other U.S. cities. Was the money raised? Yes. But thousands of people died in the weeks after the parade. While we cannot state empirically that the parade was the catalyst of the flu outbreak, the preponderance of evidence weighs heavily in favor of this hypothesis.²

As part of the exhibition, we re-created the parade on a smaller scale. At the end of the parade, we offered free flu shots. We were also aiming to engage modern public health with one of our tag lines, “looking to the past to improve our future.” What can we learn from the mistakes we made over one hundred years ago? None of us had any idea in October that this pandemic was coming.

The exhibit we opened was called “Going Viral”; it was about the ways we thought we got sick, from the humoral theory to the miasma theory to the germ theory. And then the COVID-19 pandemic happened. We're not collecting anything related to COVID-19 right now because, again, the collection revolves around the physicians and what they are using to treat the coronavirus. We also want to pivot toward patient interaction not just physician interaction. We are definitely thinking about community outreach to effectively and responsibly collect (not just material surrounding COVID-19 but also around the protests).³

MEredith EVans: I am the director of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum, the past president of the Society of American Archivists (Saa), and the former director of special collections at Washington University in St. Louis. We're not collecting COVID-19-related items, but we do share property with the Carter Center, which has decided to start doing local programming, so we'll participate in that. It will be more about creating safe spaces and educating people on COVID-19 or voting rights.

As an active member and a leader of Saa, I have been supporting the collection activities of institutions and individual archivists, and I've been leading conversations in ethics. I have also been part of the Documenting the Now project (http://www.docnow.io) since its inception when the Ferguson protests (surrounding the 2015 fatal shooting of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Missouri) began. Initially, the project was supposed to be capturing the Twitter hashtag #Ferguson because it was Twitter's largest and most used hashtag of 2014. Everybody organized at Ferguson through Twitter.

The point was to create visualization tools so that people would have the tweets for historic purposes and be able to go back to that data and research the protests. The project evolved in two ways: into community archiving and into a vibrant discussion about ethics and social media and the importance of requesting permission. We felt that journalists and other researchers putting these tweets into their articles, or their dissertations, or their books without permission from the creator was an ethical violation. We also knew that when Washington University started the Documenting Ferguson archive (http://digital.wustl/edu/ferguson/), allowing people to upload whatever they wanted related to the racial unrest and the protests, police forces were using the materials for surveillance, and they were taking images from the archive and arresting people a year or two later, which was not how the archive was intended to be used. So, from the Ferguson situation, we realized the importance of ethics. We realized that it was important to protect the creators, anonymous or not, and to protect the activists and others involved, whether or not they wanted to be.

This opening image of the Mütter Museum's exhibition “Spit Spreads Death” is of a masked Red Cross nurse who served in Philadelphia during the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic. The exhibition, which opened in October 2019, explores how neighborhoods in that city were affected by the flu and how the disease spread, and makes connections to contemporary health issues. “Spit Spreads Death: The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–19 in Philadelphia,” Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pa. Courtesy Mütter Museum.

The goal when collecting these materials is to assure people that you are preserving it for future understanding so that you get the whole picture and to not go back to the traditional way of archiving where you get only whatever the donor provides. Or what somebody has already scanned and sanitized. The process has been interesting and tricky because not only do you have to record people through these virtual channels but you also need to encourage people to keep records that are born digital, and think about version control.

RIcia ANne CHansky: I am a professor of literature in the department of English at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. Courses at the university resumed approximately forty days after Hurricane Maria decimated the area in 2017, causing more than one hundred thousand people to lose their homes and the largest blackout in U.S. history—the second largest in the world. We returned to classes with a mandate to ask our students if they were okay. And we found that many of our students were homeless. They were living in the parking lot of the university. They had no food. They could not find family members. I was out of electricity for ninety-six days, living in the dark for all of that time. I came to my project with the belief that my students were owed something. They were owed a space to share what had happened to them.

I came at this from two directions; first, I'm a narratologist. I study how stories are built. And within that I study nonfiction or autobiographical stories. I hesitate to use the word autobiography, because I look at multimodal narrative acts of the self that occur in more spaces than the written space. When I returned to my classroom in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, I built a hurricane memoir project for students, but I made participation in it optional. Every student turned in a handwritten memoir that I read by candlelight. Those materials culminated in a student writing about how she had sat on her porch and watched her neighbors bury two family members in their backyard. They had died because there was still no electricity and the hospital was still closed.

The project was about re-empowering somebody who has been disempowered by disaster. And it's important to remember that the disaster in Puerto Rico had two levels, the natural and the national—the human-made disaster of the rejection of Puerto Rico, the colonization of Puerto Rico, and the second-class status of citizenry in Puerto Rico. All of this is emphasized by the fact that our president tried to sell or trade Puerto Rico after the hurricane, threw paper towels at U.S. citizens, saying “mop up” after the storm, claimed Puerto Rico was breaking the budget, and said Puerto Ricans should not feel bad because they did not have a “real” disaster like Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I wanted to do something for my students that would help them see themselves as active agents with power. Writing a memoir helps a person situate themselves as an active agent because they become the protagonist of the story. I designed what I refer to as a mass-listening project the following semester. I was able to include one hundred undergraduate students in a grant in which I trained them in the ethical collection, transcription, translation, and editing of oral histories.

We built a base of approximately 150 oral histories of Hurricane Maria and its effect on the people of Puerto Rico. In looking at these oral histories, I realized that their overarching message when we read them together as a polyphonic history of the disaster is community response to climate disaster; the stories again and again celebrate what the neighbor does, what the person down the street does, what the church does, what the people gather together to do—to feed, to shelter, to provide clean drinking water. Again and again, the oral histories talk about the limitations or abject failures of relief efforts coming from federal and local government levels.

Over the summer, I contacted a group I collaborate with, the Humanities Action Lab (Hal), to say that I am now a person who has spent almost three years of her life in critical disaster studies, looking at real-time collecting and real-time narration of disaster. What can I do to help how Hal is taking the climate justice projects that they're working on and linking them to COVID-19 through the collection of first-person narratives? I've been working with the students who were previously trained through my Hurricane Maria project to start looking at COVID-19 stories. We're coming up with several issues here. Anger and sadness and depression—a really tangible understanding that people of color don't matter in the eyes of this presidential administration.

PEter LIebhold: I am a curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History (Nmah), where we have over sixty curators. There is unquestionably a large effort by quite a few curators to collect around the COVID-19 pandemic. We all see this as a disruption that is likely to cause real change in the ability to collect artifacts related to the time. I think all of us at the Nmah look back at 1918 and realize that nobody collected much of anything, and we're much poorer because of that. So, I hope we can do better this time around.

I was also involved in collecting around the events of September 11, 2001—an extraordinarily complicated project in that it had a public side and a hidden side. A huge dispute occurred within the museum about whether we should, in fact, collect anything. There were basically three camps. One was the people who said we should have a Swat team and immediately go in and do some collecting. Another large contingent was just horrified by the fact that a museum would take on a collection related to such an act because museums generally don't preserve acts of violence. And there was a large group of people who thought that museums should collect as they do with anything—wait twenty or thirty years. People will preserve things and we'll collect it from them in time.

Ultimately, we decided to let the different curators collect as they thought appropriate, not have a Swat team. After about a month, we took a look at what we had collected, and the answer was almost nothing. It turns out that collecting was really difficult. You can talk about it, but to really do it is challenging. With a traumatic event, the process becomes even more challenging. So, we put a couple of people on it, who pushed forward. In an event such as 9/11, where the act alone killed almost three thousand people, respect for those who died, respect for those who were injured, and respect for those who had to deal with death is important. How you approached people became part of the work. The ethics of collecting is something that we all worry about. But if you're a good collector, you have to be really driven. So, the people who were involved in the primary part of Nmah collecting were the better collectors in the museum, David Shayt and Bill Yiengst. And they used a network of friends. They were very driven. But it is about prying important and precious things from people and convincing them that they should give those items to the museum. And in the end, you have to think that you're doing the right thing.

The letter of the law is also challenging in the case of 9/11. Sarah Henry, of the Museum of the City of New York, put together a consortium, including the Nmah, that approached how to legally collect from the debris pile at the World Trade Center. It was all about salvage laws and the state registry—all practical things.

One absolutely paramount factor, I think, is that you're transparent, that you don't haul things into a museum and make them invisible. We worked hard to put them online so people could see them. I don't think, when you're asking people for objects, that they're likely to donate what is important. Sometimes they do. But being a curator is a skill. It's a black art to find folks who were in the right place at the right time and can tell good stories. It's also an iterative approach where you meet people and you engage in conversation. It's rarely a one-time visit. You develop a relationship that yields objects and then moves onto other objects where you develop a story. It is involved. It requires a commitment to an end goal.

Uses of the Past

DHody: I'm the only curator at the Mütter Museum, so I have to wear many hat's and I'm up-front about the fact that my skill set doesn't necessarily translate to being good at all of those jobs. I'm a forensic anthropologist by training. I'm interested in looking at the material culture, including the physical specimens that date back to the early 1800s. These specimens had been used to passively educate, meaning that people would look at their gross morphology and learn, perhaps, how to identify a lung from an influenza victim or how to look at a the lesions on a piece of human intestine and say that person may have had cholera. Very important.

We've also pivoted now to the fact that the people who utilize our collection have changed. Forty-five years ago, almost every person coming into the museum would have been a physician or medical student. Period. Flash forward to today and we get about 180,000 visitors per year; 97 percent of them are not in the medical field. We realized that our collection is relevant to the lay public because every person has a body.

But we've also realized that our collection has this hidden potential as a biorepository of historical infectious diseases and historical medical conditions. In the past twenty years, we've been able to access ancient Dna (aDna) through technology. We've also recently discovered that paper archives are also biorepositories. We're trying to get aDna from the letter writers who licked envelopes in 1918 and 1919. I've been reaching out to archives and finding out that not everybody saves the envelopes. They save only the letter. People have come to us wanting to donate letters from their family members from 1918 in which they're saying in the letter, “I had the flu and I'm better now” or “I'm still not feeling very well.” And if we have those envelopes, stamped by date, in these paper archives, we can test the envelope glue strip to see if the person had active influenza or had antibodies. Many of us never thought that such items would have biological and genetic information that could be used to save lives—of people living now.

Think of it this way: you have oral histories; we have viral histories. We're trying to unlock those because we might find out if this thing we're calling coronavirus is a novel virus—we don't actually know. I'm hoping to show that these types of collections have real twenty-first-century medical applications.

I'm doing this for a very specific reason, obviously—to save lives but also to save our collections. We're also dealing with people destroying their entire collections of human remains and their specimens because they're afraid of backlash about where they came from. I think that it's important to have that conversation about our responsibility for preservation while also acknowledging where many of these specimens came from and their potential to further medical knowledge and treatments, not just in the future but in the near future.

LIebhold: May I jump in for a moment? This raises an interesting point about the importance of the outside of the test kit. That is probably why you collected it. Places such the Smithsonian Institution have safety offices, and the curators are often at odds with the safety office. It's great that they want to make sure nobody gets sick. With the 9/11 collecting, we had we had many run-ins. We collected Mayor Rudy Giuliani's boots that were covered with dust, which was the point—those boots proved that he was there walking through the site. The safety officer said that they were really dangerous. And we had months of back-and-forth conversations. We did all sorts of expensive testing to determine whether they were dangerous.

In the end, the safety office refused to back down, and we refused to back down. And we did what any good curator would do—we held onto the objects. Twenty years from now, it'll be fine. The other example is this giant piece of steel from the World Trade Center brought back to the museum. It came in on a Saturday, and we did not have much time to deal with it. So, we put it in the freight elevator. I went to work on Monday, and one of the senior managers of the museum was screaming at me, taking me to task for having polluted the entire building. He said that the building crew, who were all Vietnam War veterans, had seen the piece of steel. And they said that there were human remains on it. They knew this because they were veterans, and they knew what human remains smelled like. In fact, it did have kind of a creepy smell, but it was really mostly cutting oil and jet fuel and stuff like that. I'm pretty confident it contained no human remains. But the senior manager quickly moved from human remains to pointing to where the construction workers had originally sprayed insulation on the steel while the World Trade Center was being built and said, “that's asbestos, and you've contaminated the building.” What he didn't know was that we actually knew where the asbestos was in the World Trade Center. The building did have some asbestos, but it was only on the first twenty-four to twenty-eight floors.

But whether we should take that stuff off because it was dangerous became another huge argument. We had to take core samples and send it out for testing. And lo and behold, it turned out not to be asbestos. But your point about the objects having much more use than what you might imagine is important and something that we have to be incredibly sensitive about.

Community Archives and Their Limitations

EVans: There's a lot to community archiving, particularly today, especially in marginalized communities, whether it's people of color, Lgbtq+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer), ethnic or indigenous groups, or the poor. Many identity groups have been left out of the historical narrative. And the argument has always been that there's not enough evidence for us to write about or consider this group. But if you have people who are active, whether it's the police archive or black artists who have protest art, and they were to collect it and hold onto it as long as they wanted to, then they either create a space where people can have access to it or gift it later. That's the community-archiving aspect of it. You, as the creator, control more than what you thought. And even after it's gifted to some place, you could still control it. It's educating donors, right? If we teach you now and you do it within your community, we may get the donations later or we may not. But we know it exists. And that's the whole purpose—not just to educate people on what we do but also to teach them how to do it so that it's there.⁴

Dominant institutions were going into the community and taking stuff in good faith. Say, for example, we don't have any Latinx items in our collection. We go down to this bodega. They've been here for generations. We're going to ask them for their stuff, and they're going to sign over their rights. Then we're going to digitize their items and put them all over the Internet and create an exhibit. Sounds great. It's just not fair to those people because you didn't really have a discussion with them. You haven't expressed to them the meaning of their donation and how it would be used. You're stripping somebody's family business or a community's materials and taking them miles away.

My last point is an example from my research. White Rock Baptist Church in Durham, North Carolina, was a pivotal black church. They had begun North Carolina Central Farmers Mechanics Bank and other black social and business institutions. If the church created a community archive and maintained those things for a little while and then built a relationship with wherever those items finally wind up, that's a different type of relationship, a different perspective on the narrative. And there's an engagement with the community. The only way to build that trust is to teach the community how to collect and archive items themselves.

LIebhold: But there are huge dangers in that. I think that community members should be stakeholders and should have input. But I have more faith in Meredith; I think that trained professionals do an important job. You should talk to the community. You should spend time with the community. By the end of the day, I'm a whole lot happier if you, rather than the community, are doing it.

EVans: I hear you on that. But I also think that we've been archiving in this way for years. The institution protects what they want to protect. When dealing with other communities, it takes me years to build the trust to take a collection. There are not enough duplicates of me, anyway, in the profession.

DHody: For our influenza collecting, we hired a community organizer to work with the public on how the 1918 influenza pandemic affected their families and their community. We did find that even though this flu pandemic happened one hundred years ago, it was still profoundly emotionally traumatic because people who had parents who had died in the pandemic were still alive; they had the stories that they heard and told. We digitized over thirty thousand death records of people who had died between 1918 and 1919. You could actually find death records organized by your neighborhood and find out if somebody had died at the house you were living in. That's another thing people wanted to find out.

The responses we received were absolutely amazing because we don't have a lot of material culture associated with influenza in 1918. It took a back seat to World War I. And it was actively tamped down by President Woodrow Wilson and by his administration. They did not want to focus on what was going on. We see many correlations, unfortunately, today.

CHansky: In generationally marginalized communities, a valuation of the record of lives does not often exist. Multiple communities within the United States are being actively taught that their stories don't matter and don't count.

It's very important that we're not extractive. Designing my project the way I did, with one hundred undergraduate students who are fairly representative of the regions of Puerto Rico, means that I'm not necessarily the front person who's going into a community. I'm training a student as part of their educational experience to go into their home community with a different set of eyes, a respectful and ethical set of eyes, but one that says, “where are the stories and where are the parts of the stories that need to be recorded, and how can I facilitate recording that?” It's important for people to hear these stories, and it's good for the speakers to know that they're listened to, because we want to enact policy change and because we're in a climate emergency. And the lessons learned from these stories are imperative for people all around the world.

Sadly, we do not have the capability within Puerto Rico to archive a digital collection of this magnitude. So, we've worked out a nonexclusive agreement with the Oral History Archives at Columbia University. The nonprofit organization Voice of Witness will also be publishing the book Mi María: Puerto Rico after the Hurricane in 2021 to feature these stories.

EVans: The Web site A People's Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland has an archivist on their advisory board to assist. Every couple of years the archivist goes back to the board to see if they're okay, and if they're not, there's a contingency plan. Part of these community partnerships is validating that they should exist, that these communities should exist, that these communities should maintain some things that we're not here to take. We're here to help.

CHansky: And, Meredith, another aspect of that is the weight of history—that there is a history of an external agent entering my community and taking something. In many instances, that was harmful to the community. When I enter a community as a researcher, that weight is on my shoulders. I can't ask a community that I don't know, that I'm not a part of, to trust me and to trust that everything I do will be ethical and respectful and collaborative, because they don't know me. They know these hundreds of years in which people have entered their communities and taken something from them.