Tag Archives: COVID Tracking Project

COVID Tracking Project Records and Resources Now Available

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This announcement is authored by COVID Tracking Project Archive Lead, Alex Duryee

The UCSF Library Archives and Special Collections is pleased to announce that the COVID Tracking Project (CTP) records are available online for research.  The CTP is a crowdsourced digital archive that was managed by a group of journalists at The Atlantic and approximately 500 volunteers who gathered, cataloged, and published state-level COVID-19 data over the first fifteen months of the pandemic. “The COVID Tracking Project was a remarkable and influential initiative — part citizen science, part journalism, part crisis response. I’m thrilled that UCSF Archives has acquired, processed, and made available the digital records of this unique organization,” said Amanda French, a digital archivist and key leader of the CTP at The Atlantic.

In addition to the CTP’s data products, this collection includes its data creation and quality records, organizational records, correspondence, and code repositories. Over 2,100 academic articles have cited data from the collection and federal agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Open records available

The finding aid on the Online Archive of California describes the entirety of the collection and includes all of the CTP records held by UCSF. Records range from data processing infrastructure and documentation, correspondence with state and territorial health departments, original COVID-19 data captures, and Slack discussions like #gratitude and #emoji-march-madness.  A significant portion of the collection is restricted until 2102 to protect the privacy of CTP members. However, the open records are available for digitally and on-site by appointment within the UCSF Library Archives and Special Collections reading room. 

The final data products from the CTP are available on Dryad, in accordance with FAIR principles:

In addition to the final data sets, UCSF developed a tool for viewing the data as it changed over time.  COVID-19 data was never static. Often reporting schedules were inconsistent around weekends and holidays, and data was either reported late or updated long after the initial release. Another factor was that states continuously changed their data definitions throughout the pandemic. UCSF’s Data Explorer lets researchers view CTP’s data as it was updated, providing a more profound view of the topline numbers. Data Explorer includes references to original data sources (generally screenshots of websites and data files) and daily Slack discussions for each reporting source (available on-site at UCSF).

Oral histories and open source tools

Along with the collection’s files and data, the CTP records include oral histories created by the CTP as it came to a close in 2021.  These oral histories provide a human-centered perspective on the data, the organization, and the pandemic in the United States.  With permission from the interviewees, the oral histories are available via Calisphere.

The UCSF Archives and Special Collections also developed several open-source tools to aid in acquisition, preservation, and access to the CTP materials. CTP used platforms like GitHub, Instagram, and Twitter for public and internal communication.  These platforms do not always provide accessible tools for preserving data; thus, UCSF created tools to download posts and private messages and generate access versions in PDF.  These tools are available on GitHub for use in and development of digital archives.

Inspiring future research and education

This collection was designed in adherence to UCSF Library’s Archives as Data initiative and the broader Collections as Data movement. UCSF Archives and Special Collections developed multiple platforms and pathways to approach the collection.

This way researchers across disciplines can discover and use the records in their work. Whether it is from an epidemiological, social science, or data science lens, CTP archive lead Alexander Duryee acknowledges the powerful insights this collection affords, “We believe that this collection will provide key context for the story of the pandemic and that researchers across disciplines will find it illuminating.” By cross-linking between the archival collection, oral histories, and data sets, the collection encourages deep exploration of the “whats” and “hows” of the CTP and its data.

The collection serves as the foundation of the Data Journalism Course In A Box (DJCB) project, which is building a data science curriculum around the CTP records to support journalism education.  The collection includes a comprehensive view of the data, from its initial publication on agency web pages through quality control and publication. Investigative reporter Tyler Dukes is developing the DJCB with the help of the UCSF team. The curriculum uses CTP data to illustrate to journalists how to work with and analyze real-world public health data and how to communicate complex topics to a broad audience.

Project team members

  • Tyler Dukes, data journalism consultant
  • Alexander Duryee, Covid Tracking Project archive lead
  • Edith Escobedo, UCSF project archivist
  • Polina Ilieva, UCSF Associate University Librarian for Collections and archivist
  • Charlie Macquarie, former UCSF digital archivist
  • Kevin Miller, former Covid Tracking Project archive lead

In addition, the team would like to thank the many collaborators across the University of California system and advisory board members for their contributions to this project.

Funding for The COVID Tracking Project Archive was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (Sloan grant G-2022-17133).

Alex Duryee Named New COVID Tracking Project Archive Lead

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The UCSF Archives & Special Collections is delighted to welcome our new colleague, Alex Duryee who took over from Kevin Miller as the COVID Tracking Project Archive Lead. The project team continues the work of preserving, providing online access, and building educational resources for the organizational records and datasets of the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic (CTP).

Alex Duryee

Alex brings a background in metadata, digital archives, and archival access to the COVID Tracking Project Archive team.  He holds a BA from The College of New Jersey and a MLIS from Rutgers University, and also serves as the Manager for Archival Metadata at the New York Public Library.  In this position, he manages the Library’s archival metadata platforms and develops metadata policy for the Library’s archival collections.  He also collaborates with staff across the organization to improve systems integrations and develop new methods for accessing and using archival materials.  Alex also serves on the National Finding Aid Network (NAFAN) Technical Advisory Working Group, SAA’s Technical Subcommittee for Encoded Archival Standards, and as the chair of the SNAC (Social Networks and Archival Context) Technology & Infrastructure Working Group.  He contributes to open-source projects such as ArchivesSpace, as well as developing open-source metadata tools.  In 2019, his team was awarded the C. F. W. Coker Award for Archival Description by the Society of American Archivists.

Alex’s background also includes experience as a freelance ArchivesSpace developer, a consultant with AVP, and a digital archives fellow with Rhizome.

Alex enjoys puzzles of all sorts (including metadata), board games, baking, and dancing.

Continuing Conversations

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This week’s story comes from Isabella Durgin, third-year English and geography student at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

Post by Isabella Durgin:

Human connection can break the space-time continuum. 

This summer, I worked with the UCSF Archives & Special Collections department to help the digital archiving of the COVID Tracking Project (CTP), a cohort of volunteers that worked under The Atlantic to document and report on the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the Project came to a close in 2021, they also began to tell their story – and that was where I came in. Along with the team, my work at UCSF ultimately spun a layered tale of interconnectedness.

As a Digital Archive Intern, I was primarily responsible for the organization and curation of the Oral History Archive component of the broader CTP Archive. These files were the product of CTP’s internal interviews to break down and reflect on the work of volunteers and staff. Interviews occurred across a large period of time, spanning from the winddown of the Project in spring 2021 to several months later, when the gears had pretty much ground to a halt. 

Many interviews allocated a significant portion of time to discuss the community they had found during the first 365 days of the pandemic – March 7, 2020 to March 7, 2021 – during which CTP was producing publicly available data and information.

The people at CTP built an organization to handle an extremely unfamiliar crisis with fairly unfamiliar tools – now virtual workplace darlings like Zoom and Slack. Nevertheless, a thriving hive was built up bit by bit (and byte by byte), founded on prioritizing volunteers as humans and crafting a new language of custom emoji.

And somehow, by the end of the summer, I felt like I had a place in it as well. 

Without speaking to any of these people or bonding by synchronistically living through the same pandemic moments, I still had the same experience of feeling like part of something bigger. Which, in some ways, was the hope – the longstanding one, anyways – for the Oral Histories. One of the intentions was for others to learn from CTP’s approach and use the model in other contexts in order to build more compassionate and sustainable communities. 

Around a year after CTP’s 2021 conversations about the year prior, I was able to tap into the web of people and relationships. The same can be done with the thousands of other files in the CTP Archive; there is the same potential for different fields to learn from the stories told by the outreach efforts or the data journalism. Even the numbers tell a story. We just have to be ready to preserve and to listen – actions I learned are far more similar than one may think.