We are excited to announce that our Saskatchewan’s Covid-19 project was one of five teams chosen to participate in the 2022-23 cohort of the Archives Unleashed program.
The Unleashed team has received two Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grants grants to build tools that help researchers search and analyze web archives.
For our team, this partnership will provide us with training in using new web archiving algorithms and tools. Since the start of the pandemic, we have gathered several Petabytes of data related to COVID-19 in Saskatchewan. This is an immensely important resource but sifting through this quantity of information is impossible for a small team. Through Archive Unleashed, we will gain direct access to key Archive-IT collections hosted by the Internet Archive, which also manages the more popular WayBack Machine. This will help us search through social media, websites, and other archive content more quickly and effectively.
Every tool is only as good as the operator.
The Archives Unleashed project is also helping to fund PhD candidate Derek Cameron. Through monthly workshops he will be learning how to use these new tools, with the aim of integrating these learnings into his research on the history of vaccine hesitancy in Saskatchewan. Meanwhile, the Remember Rebuild team will be leveraging the tools and data to explore how medical misinformation is perpetuated through social media networks. In this case, the small population of Saskatchewan makes it possible to trace out digital networks and identify how they influence distrust or opposition to public health policies.