About

Our goal

Using web archives collected by Brock University, this project will examine how organizations in the Niagara region have responded to government COVID-19 mandates. Analysis will focus on investigating three types of entities: local government, non-profit organizations, and major private entities. Findings from this research aim to inform future crisis communication organizational planning, specifically at the local and municipal level. The project will also create several open computational notebooks to support teaching, learning, and research.

Project Team

Tim Ribaric

David Sharron

Cal Murgu

Karen Louise Smith

Duncan Koerber

Research Assistants

Victoria Danh

Fletcher Johnson

The Collection

Datasets used to complete this project will mainly be derived from the COVID19 in Niagara Web Archive collection. This collection performs a weekly crawl of websites of major institutions, governments and organizations in the Niagara area focusing on the varied responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Further, one time crawls of newspaper articles focused on Niagara centric COVID-19 news. It is managed by the Brock University Archives and Special Collections.

Methods

Using Archive-It analysis tools, the team will create derivative files, such as full-text derivates, or url derivates, which will later be explored using other methods. Methods include text analysis techniques, such as sentiment and word frequency/tf-idf analysis, topic modelling to determine topic clusters, and close reading techniques.

Partners

This project is made possible by financial and technical support from the folks at the Archives Unleashed Project:

Ian Milligan (University of Waterloo)

Jefferson Bailey (Internet Archive)

Nick Ruest (York University)

Jimmy Lin (University of Waterloo)

Samantha Fritz (University of Waterloo)