With any research project, documenting the research process has considerable value. Often, the process can be more telling than the findings. Taking a step back, this post will serve to provide a synopsis of our project’s development, along with a discussion of the subject we are researching and why it is relevant to the present. The nature of our research is highly interdisciplinary. Unlike many forms of research where individuals collaborate within the same field of study, this research aims to bring together students of various backgrounds to investigate the role print media played during the 1918 Influenza pandemic. This topic is especially pertinent in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, as media plays an immense role in the dispersal of information and hence the public reaction to that information. Further, an interdisciplinary team is suited for this topic that transcends the boundaries of a single academic field. Although our research has been centered around the role of newspaper media during the 1918 Influenza pandemic, the specific focus of the research has been in flux while the research process progressed. After our initial inspection of primary newspaper sources from the time period, a few common themes emerged. First, it was apparent that the lack of media sources covering black communities was indicative of racial disparities during the time period. The effect of the Jim Crow Era policies was engrained in American communities. This was prevalent to such an extent that adjacent black and white communities experienced different patterns in epidemiological progression. [1] Secondly, advertisements within newspapers revealed the extent to which the virus was a mystery, as many ‘miracle cure’ products were presented as being an effective method of curing the illness without any scientific or medical merit. [2] Interestingly, some effective methods in preventing the spread of viruses, such as proper hand washing and social distancing measures, were promoted well before a virus was identified as the cause of this mysterious sickness. With these topics in mind, we then decided to look into what advertisements could tell us about the public’s response to the pandemic. However, there was some debate as to how, or even if, public response could be adequately and substantially gauged using the tools at our disposal. We decided that it would be difficult to identify the public’s reaction to what they were reading in the newspapers, as the newspapers themselves are our main primary sources. Instead, we decided to look at factors leading to the coverage of certain topics within the newspapers. After further research, we noted that the 1918 influenza pandemic coinciding with the end of the first world war led to increased political strife and tension, both globally and domestically. [3] Additionally, we found that the scholarly literature investigating the role of politics in the 1918 coverage of the pandemic was sparse. Noting that today political pressures play a significant role in media coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, we decided that delving deeper into the political pressures of 1918 and how politics influenced media coverage of the pandemic could be a productive direction for our project. When the class first discussed making this our specific research topic, some concerns were raised. The research would be largely qualitative, and political and media theories have been extensively written about by experts for decades, so as undergraduate researchers, we might have a hard time making valid assertions without the benefit of scholarly expertise. However, we discovered a useful source (https://usnewsmap.com/), that allows for specific word frequencies in newspapers across the country during the 1918 Pandemic to be numerically and graphically displayed. This source permitted a quantitative dimension to be included in the research so that it does not rely solely on the analysis of political theory. In addition, this furthers the extent to which the research is interdisciplinary. Although we have made great progress in the research process, there is still much work to be done, from further researching political theories to analyzing trends in the aforementioned word frequencies. By documenting and scrutinizing our research process thus far, our team will be better equipped to dive deeper into the later stages of the process to produce relevant and meaningful research. References
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