HIST4702 (2022-23) Digital History Project: SARS in Asia
Abstract
Website Group
This website is a digital project conducted by a group of students from the Chinese University of Hong Kong studying the HIST4702 Digital History (2022-23) course. We aimed at introducing SARS and showcasing the virus’s transmission, socio-economic impacts and how the society responded, during and after its pandemic era. We aim to provide a user-friendly experience and hope that our visualisations are informative and pleasing to view.
We have published our website within the Django CMS platform, a free and open source system which makes available a wide array of plugins. These plugins retain our text in a neat presentation format and embed our files, which allow users to interact with the creations of the other groups, such as Tableau graphs, maps and SketchUp 3D models. Some of these files can be downloaded for personal usage and convenience.
Our website is graciously supported by Digital Scholarship Team of our Library, which agreed to host it for a minimum of two years. It has also provided much significant input over how we have formatted and styled our website. We highly appreciate their help, and expressed our sincere gratitude for all the help from the Lab.
We have utilized various means in coordinating with other groups in the course. Website group members were assigned to communicate with other groups’ representatives, so as to monitor the progress of other groups, make recommendations and assist them when necessary. This ensured steady and constant communication between all groups.
Map Group
For this project, our group has created four sets of maps to support our arguments. The first set includes Figure 1 (Singapore Map) and Figure 2 (Hong Kong Map), which were both made by QGIS. They aim to display the situations of the outbreak of 2003 SARS in Singapore and Hong Kong respectively. These two maps are particularly useful for understanding the factors behind the outbreak of the pandemic when we compare them side by side. It is observed that (1) superclusters of both places happened in hospitals ; (2) the higher the population density and connectivity of road networks, the easier and faster the spread of the disease.
The second set is an interactive map of temperature and relative humidity during the SARS Outbreak from 25 February to 23 June 2003 in both Hong Kong and Singapore. It compares the temperature and relative humidity of both places to see whether there is any relationship between weather and the number of cases. It is found that in different periods of time, similar temperature and humidity levels could result in different patterns of reported cases. Therefore, there does not appear to have existed a clear positive/negative correlation (let alone causation) between temperature and humidity levels and the number of cases reported within the scope of this study.
The third set consists of two maps showing (1) the transmission routes of the first infected cases in Vietnam, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Philippines and (2) the air transmission routes in Asia. The first map indicates that most of the first cases were not imported from China, the origin of SARS, but from Hong Kong, which could be explained by the high accessibility of Hong Kong and its strong connections with other parts of the world as an international city. The second map shows the routes of several international flights that caused the spread of SARS to different countries. It supports our argument that international flight is an important factor that affects the global disease-spreading situation.
Lastly, the purpose of the last map is to show the correlation between the death rate of SARS and the GDP per capita of different countries. It is used to testify our hypothesis that the higher the GDP per capita, the lower the death rate. However, the result proves our hypothesis wrong. We could see that the place with the highest death rate, which is Taiwan, has a higher GDP than China and the Phillippines.
3D Modelling Group
Greetings, we are the 3-D Modelling group of the digital history project “Pandemics in Asian History”. In this project, we have created models of Amoy Garden, an important trigger point residential area that led to the outbreak in 2003. Before we dig into our findings, here is a brief introduction regarding the digital tool we applied for the 3-D models.
Making three-dimensional representations of an item or a surface is known as 3-D modeling. The models are useful for us to display artefacts, structures and environments visually. Through 3-D modelling, we can simulate scenarios by digital reconstructing historical sites. Our group applied SketchUp for our model creating. This app is a simple but useful tool to conduct historical research involving digital reconstruction of particular sites (i.e., the Amoy Garden). 3D modeling can be used to determine an object’s size, shape, and texture. Points, lines, and polygons were used to create the 3D figures in the program.
With the help of SketchUp, our group was able to apply 3-D models into humanities-related studies. With the assistance of SketchUp and the related references (including government report, newsletters, academic studies, and various diagrams), we created the models. During the 3-D modelling progress, we concluded that the outbreak of SARS in Amoy Garden was highly related to the air flow between blocks and the pipe system within the buildings. While working on the full plan and the floor plan, we had a deeper understanding on the severe influence of SARS on the residents in Amoy Garden (especially those lived in Block E) and its detrimental effects towards Hong Kong in 2003.
Video Group
Our group is responsible for creating multiple videos that will be incorporated into the website. Our goal is to produce a short documentary where we will conduct interviews, create visualisations and/or simple animations and utilise more pre-existent materials. We will assemble those contents together and use voiceover as well as subtitles in order to make our video accessible to as many people as possible. Moreover, we will produce an introduction video for the website. This video will talk about the HIST4702 class project and introduce the topic (social impacts of the 2003 SARS outbreak in Hong Kong). The short documentary will then go into more depth on said topic. Using interviews with two experts, we will show how the pandemic shaped life in Hong Kong and how it affected people in their daily lives. This will be accompanied by research we conducted on SARS in the form of a voice-over narrative.
There will be several videos posted on our group’s YouTube Channel, consisting of an introduction video and an interview video as the two main contents of our work. For the work distribution of the introduction video, all of us worked hard on the script writing. We all found a lot of resources for the script writing and had several meetings for it, and lastly, Cara edited the script in order for it to have a consistent structure. Nino then did proof-reading for the script. For the voice-overs, since there were many parts separated according to the scripts, Clara, Nino and Cara were responsible for most parts of the voice-overs. Jessie was the video editor for the introduction video and some of the fantastic illustrations were drawn and made by her.
As for the interview video, Cara and Jessie successfully invited and interviewed Prof. Luk and Dr. Fok from the History Department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Both of them personally experienced SARS in 2003 and more importantly, they are experts in Hong Kong history and thus would share rich content with the audience. LI Yueqian and Lucia edited the video material for both of the interviews.
For the documentary, Lucia gathered different materials and combined them with group discussions to complete the script for the documentary. In the script, Lucia summarised the ideas and marked the video content to match each line of text. The voiceover part of the documentary was also done by Nino and Clara. As our documentary was twelve minutes long, it was important to gather enough video footage. Clara travelled to Hong Kong Island to shoot the SARS memorial and uploaded many of her videos of the Hong Kong landscape, as well as scoured the web for other videos we could use. Lucia searched various organisations and government websites for exhibitions and documents about SARS and provided videos of the crowds she filmed. Yueqian used the camera to film street scenes of Hong Kong and the crowds under the influence of COVID-19 in locations such as MTR stations, university libraries and Causeway Bay. Some of the close-ups were also shot by Yueqian, such as the pills used to spell out SARS at the beginning of the documentary.
The editing of the documentary was done by Yueqian. She integrated the footage uploaded by the group members and edited the entire video. The video was edited using Jianyin Pro and consisted of dozens of audio tracks and hundreds of video clips. Thanks to Lucia’s detailed script, the editing process went smoothly. When processing the Dr. Fok interview, Clara and Nino helped Yueqian with the background noise of the interview audio. However, the noise was still present in the video, despite the use of several softwares.
Data Group
Our research focuses on the spread and subsequent impacts of SARS in Hong Kong. By using data analysis methods, with Excel and Tableau as the main analytical tools, a new perspective is brought to the study of SARS.
After conducting data collection, data visualisation and data analysis, we found that despite the limited number of SARS cases, it still hurt the economic and social development of Hong Kong. In addition, by comparing Hong Kong with mainland China (Guangdong) and Singapore, we found that SARS most significantly impacted Hong Kong. Finally, the H1N1 epidemic in Hong Kong in 2009, also an infectious disease, had a much smaller negative impact, although it had a much higher number of cases than SARS. It can be seen that Hong Kong was hit hard by SARS 20 years ago, but at the same time gained some experience and lessons in preventing infectious diseases.
Text Mining Group
Being widely used in knowledge-driven organizations, text mining is the process of examining large collections of documents to discover new information or help answer specific research questions.
Text mining identifies facts, relationships and assertions that would otherwise remain buried in the mass of textual big data. Once extracted, this information is converted into a structured form that can be further analyzed, or presented directly using clustered HTML tables, mind maps, charts, etc.
Our group use the Voyant Tool as the main tool for our project. It is a web-based text reading and analysis environment. It is a scholarly project that is designed to facilitate reading and interpretive practices for digital humanities students and scholars.
We target the Economic Impact, Social Impact and Government response during the SARS pandemic in Hong Kong.
We have used:
26 samples for Economic Impact
39 Samples for Social Impact
15 Samples for Government response
80 documents with 460,647 total words in total.
We mainly use Cirrus, Summary and Links as the major functions to analyse texts. We also create a stopword list to exclude some distractive terms like “is”, and “the” to make the result clear.
We use Voyant Tool as a word mining tool to investigate the economic impacts, social impacts and official responses during the SARS pandemic in Hong Kong. Hong Kong suffered from economic downfall and psychological disorders and the government tried their best to stop the pandemic and reduce its effect.
Website Designed by:
Website Group of HIST4702 Digital History (2022-23)