Four years ago today I put out the first issue of CoronaBuzz, my attempt to keep up with the rapidly-evolving changes to news about covid-19/coronavirus/the 'rona or whatever you call it.
It was not the first time I mentioned covid in ResearchBuzz, though. In January 2020 I indexed an article about a coronavirus map from Johns Hopkins and an assessment from NiemanLab about China's medical misinformation efforts in the face of this new virus. At the time I was tagging this articles with "Wuhan Pneumonia," as it was known. Needless to say that tag got dropped early on in favor of "covid-19" and "coronavirus."
It is my nature, when confronted with an overwhelming event, to try to understand what's happening. I have little money, power, or personal influence to impact the course of goings-on, but I have a brain in my head capable of aggregating and organizing data in an attempt to understand it. And of course I share it in the hope that it will help other people create their own solutions; I certainly don't have all the answers. Longtime readers of ResearchBuzz will remember I did this right after 9/11 as well. Those resource/information pages were archived by the Library of Congress among many others. Covid, of course, has been a much different event in terms of time and impact than 9/11. I am still indexing articles related to covid though much less frequently than I was in the beginning.
ResearchBuzz Firehose (RBF) now has as part of its collection over 13,800 articles related to covid-19, most of them collected during the first two years of the pandemic. I'm writing this article to show you how to browse the collection, search it by tag, search it by keyword, and monitor it by RSS feed. It shouldn't be considered complete, as I had a lot going on in my personal life -- several people in my family had covid and one spent over a week in ICU and almost died -- but it is a wide-ranging collection covering several aspects of the pandemic, including healthcare, public health, cultural considerations, politics, and international relations.
Accessing Indexed Covid Articles on the RBF
All covid articles on the RBF are both tagged and put in their own category, Covid-19. You can access all of them at https://rbfirehose.com/category/covid-19/ . This is the easiest way to get all the articles in chronological order but it's not great for searching. Still, if you're trying to get articles by time span it's great. The category is paginated (926 pages at this writing).
2021 starts on page 414: https://rbfirehose.com/category/covid-19/page/414/
2022 starts on page 103: https://rbfirehose.com/category/covid-19/page/103/
2023 starts on page 5: https://rbfirehose.com/category/covid-19/page/5/
If you're interested in more in-depth browsing than using chronological order, you can browse by tag or search by keyword.
Browsing Covid Articles by Tag
All covid articles on the RBF are tagged with both covid-19 and coronavirus. I think early on I was worried about other variants and had some vague idea of separating out the news, but I ended up giving all the variants their own tags so didn't happen. Anyway, all covid stories can be accessed this way: https://rbfirehose.com/tag/coronavirus/ . I think I must have missed a tag here and there because the pagination count is 925, but that's a human for you.
Each indexed article has a page that looks like this:
The tags used to index the article are at the very bottom of the entry:
As you can see I also occasionally forget to remove my tag spelling errors, which is why this article is tagged with both "public health" and "public helath". I'll take it out later but y'all can just laugh at me for the moment, because I want to show you can combine tags to search the covid articles.
You can combine tags in WordPress with +. For example, if we wanted to browse for healthcare articles related to covid on the RBF, we could do this:
https://rbfirehose.com/tag/coronavirus+healthcare
If there's a space in the tag, you express that space with a hyphen. So a browse for public health related to coronavirus would look like this:
https://rbfirehose.com/tag/coronavirus+public-health
You can stack keywords as well. Want to know what Ron DeSantis was doing about mask mandates in Florida? No problem:
https://rbfirehose.com/tag/coronavirus+Florida+Ron-DeSantis+mask-mandates/
I created tags as necessary, so there's no big directory, but you should be able to get a sense of what's available from the tag listings on each entry. The news is primarily American, but I indexed articles from other countries as I found them; https://rbfirehose.com/tag/coronavirus+Mongolia/ only has one result, but it does have one result.
You might be wondering if you HAVE to use the coronavirus or Covid-19 tags when browsing the ResearchBuzz Firehose for covid-related articles. The answer is sometimes you don't, but it's best if you usually do. For example, one of the RBF tags is "vaccine cards." If you go to https://rbfirehose.com/tag/vaccine-cards/ without including coronavirus as part of your search, you'll only get covid stories, because I created the tag vaccine cards due to covid.
On the other hand, if you go to https://rbfirehose.com/tag/Elon-Musk/ you're going to get lots of news about Twitter. It's only if you add coronavirus and make it https://rbfirehose.com/tag/coronavirus+Elon-Musk/ that you'll immediately see articles about outbreaks at Tesla and SpaceX.
If you're not have much luck either searching by tags or finding appropriate tags for your search, I recommend searching by keyword and looking at the tags in your search results.
Searching Covid Articles By Keyword
Maybe you're interested in how fairs and festivals were impacted by covid-19. You're not sure what tag might be useful so you search the RBF instead. The basic syntax for searching a WordPress site is https://rbfirehose.com/?s=, so searching for the words "state fairs" would look like this: https://rbfirehose.com/?s=state%20fairs (The "%20" is how the browser encodes a space. If you just include a space when you enter the URL in your browser it will encode automatically.) That search will get these results:
The first two results aren't relevant, but the third is, and clicking on that one will give us some tag ideas for our next search:
Monitoring Updates to Indexed Covid Articles With RSS Feeds
While the news cycles have moved on to other things the fact remains that covid-19 is still circulating and unfortunately people are still getting sick and dying from it. I am adding articles to the index as I have time and will do so indefinitely; I have turned off most of my covid-19 information monitoring structure but I still get plenty of news via university RSS feeds and ancillary information coming in via Google Alerts.
You can get an RSS feed for the whole covid-19 category here: https://rbfirehose.com/category/covid-19/feed/ .
Want to monitor a particular tag with an RSS feed? Here's a feed for the tag "Wastewater-Based Epidemiology (WBE):" https://rbfirehose.com/tag/wastewater-based-epidemiology-wbe/feed/
You can also monitor combinations of tags, though this is kind of stunty and you're gambling that I'm going to use ALL these tags in an upcoming post. I don't recommend doing it, but this does work: https://rbfirehose.com/tag/coronavirus+Florida+Ron-DeSantis+mask-mandates/feed/
You can even monitor a keyword search with an RSS feed. https://rbfirehose.com/?s=wastewater&feed=rss will give you an RSS feed for the RBF search "wastewater." I recommend that you use tag feeds whenever possible, as the summaries I'm including don't have enough text to reliably allow you to use the additional keywords "covid-19" or "coronavirus."
No comments:
Post a Comment