New York City COVID-19 Web Activism Collection
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Abstract
The NYC COVID-19 Web Activism Collection, assembled by Tamiment archivists, documents activism and mutual aid in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, starting in 2020. The collection consists of archived websites on topics such as tenants rights, workers organizing surrounding unsafe working conditions, racism, and decarceration.
Historical Note
In March 2020, non-essential businesses throughout New York City closed in an effort to contain COVID-19, a respiratory virus that first identified in December 2019. The virus and the closures disproportionally affected systematically excluded groups. Within days of the shutdown, activists began to organize to provide mutual aid and information about the COVID-19 to support sex workers, veterans, immigrants, LGBTQIA people, incarcerated people, workers, and others. Over the course of the pandemic, these individuals and organizations pushed for worker protections, housing and tenant relief, decarceration, and called attention to ways in which COVID-19 has impacted New York City physically, emotionally, politically, and economically. During the pandemic, George Floyd, a black man, was killed by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer, in May 2020. This led to protests calling for the abolishment of the police and a resurgence in the Black Lives Matter movement. As the pandemic continued into 2021 and 2022, pushes for a "return to normal" by the establishment and government--despite continued resurgences in COVID-19 cases and deaths--led to activists pushing for rent assistance, an eviction moratorium, vaccine mandates, masking, ventilation and other environmental concerns, unionization efforts, city budget reforms, safe staffing for healthcare workers, and more permanent actions to keep people safe and healthy. As of this writing in April 2022, the pandemic is still an active part of life.
Arrangement
Websites are arranged alphabetically by creator.
Scope and Contents
The NYC COVID-19 Web Activism Collection documents activists' use of social media and the internet to create content, online campaigns, online actions, virtual mutual aid networks and funds to highlight, resist, and call attention to ways in which COVID-19 has impacted New York City physically, emotionally, politically, and economically. This collection also focused on the ways in which this activism names and addresses the ways in which COVID-19 has disproportionately affected low income communities of color in New York City. Subjects covered within the scope of this collection include organizing around tenants rights and rent strikes; housing insecurity; decarceration campaigns and efforts to raise bail for incarcerated individuals (especially those facing COVID-19 outbreaks in New York City jails); efforts to confront and combat anti-Asian racism; demilitarization campaigns; efforts to confront and combat environmental racism; organizing around access to healthcare; neighborhood autonomy and agency; and support and organizing for workers who are striking against unsafe work conditions, lack of hazard pay, and/or lack of benefits. This is an artificial collection, materials were selected by Tamiment curators and arranged by an archivist.
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Topics
Conditions Governing Access
Majority of the collection is open to researchers without restrictions. Some materials are closed to protect the privacy of activists.
Conditions Governing Use
This collection is protected by copyright and/or related rights. You are free to use materials in the collection in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s).
Preferred Citation
Identification of item, date; New York City COVID-19 Web Activism Collection; TAM 798; Wayback URL; Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University.
Immediate Source of Acquisition
Websites are selected by curators Shannon O'Neill and Michael Koncewicz and web archivist Nicole Greenhouse through the use of Archive-It. Archive-It uses web crawling technology to capture websites at a scheduled time and displays only an archived copy, from the resulting WARC file, of the website. The accession numbers associated with these websites are 2020.040, 2021.002, 2021.003, 2021.005, 2021.007, 2021.012, 2021.016, 2021.047, 2021.051, 2021.067, 2021.084, 2022.006, 2022.023, 2022.032, 2022.033, 2022.034, 2022.035, 2022.054, 2022.069, 2022.074, 2022.089, 2023.006, 2023.028, 2023.034, 2023.58, 2023.069, 2023.099, 2023.105, and 2024.062.
Physical Characteristics and Technical Requirements
Due to technical or privacy issues, archived websites may not be exact copies of the original website at the time of the web crawl. Certain file types will not be captured dependent on how they are embedded in the site. Other parts of websites that the crawler has difficulty capturing includes Javascript, streaming content, database-driven content, and highly interactive content. Full-Text searches of archived websites are available at https://archive-it.org/organizations/567.
Google drive domains (drive.google.com) were partially captured but cannot be played back in Wayback. Instagram pages were captured using Webrecorder, but cannot be played back in Wayback.
Take Down Policy
Archived websites are made accessible for purposes of education and research. NYU Libraries have given attribution to rights holders when possible; however, due to the nature of archival collections, we are not always able to identify this information.
If you hold the rights to materials in our archived websites that are unattributed, please let us know so that we may maintain accurate information about these materials.
If you are a rights holder and are concerned that you have found material on this website for which you have not granted permission (or is not covered by a copyright exception under US copyright laws), you may request the removal of the material from our site by submitting a notice, with the elements described below, to the special.collections@nyu.edu.
Please include the following in your notice: Identification of the material that you believe to be infringing and information sufficient to permit us to locate the material; your contact information, such as an address, telephone number, and email address; a statement that you are the owner, or authorized to act on behalf of the owner, of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed and that you have a good-faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; a statement that the information in the notification is accurate and made under penalty of perjury; and your physical or electronic signature. Upon receiving a notice that includes the details listed above, we will remove the allegedly infringing material from public view while we assess the issues identified in your notice.
Appraisal
Robots.txt (a piece of code designed to limit crawler activity within a website) was ignored. The collection was rescoped to allow for Google documents, videos, and Airtable forms embedded in the website.
About this Guide
Processing Information
In May 2020, Tamiment curators Shannon O'Neill and Michael Koncewicz selected websites on New York City activism related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The collection was maintained by Nicole Greenhouse. Maintenance of the collection consisted of rescoping due to missing captured content, redirects and content drift, missing embedded materials (such as videos or attached Google documents and pdfs), and other materials created by selected entities that is related to the pandemic. The finding aid was created in Spring 2022 and description was standardized across the collection.
In summer 2023, links from the resources page on the Zip Code Memory Project were added to the collection. In fall 2023, videos from the Zip Code Memory Project was added to the collection. In Fall 2024, X links were added to the collection.
