Documenting COVID-19 in Australia: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

Abstract

Social media posts and unpublished student projects are just two examples of the digital content – a type of ephemeral popular culture – produced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Collecting this material would provide researchers and analysts with information that is complementary to other data used to report and capture the crisis, such as government policies and scientific documentation. But what are the long-term privacy implications of collecting this material? In this time of privacy paradoxes and the Data Economy, does the responsibility for the ethical use of this data fall onto the archivists and researchers?