Archive of the Digital Present (ADP), COVID-19 Period: Collecting and Visualizing Metadata of Online Literary Events Hosted in Canada, March 2020 - September 2021

Archive of the Digital Present for Online Literary Performance in Canada (COVID-19 Pandemic Period) is a research and development project that arises out of the need to address foundational, practical and theoretical research questions about the impact of the recent (and ongoing) COVID-19 pandemic, and attendant social disruptions and restrictions, upon literary communities in Canada through the study of organised literary events as they have occurred online since March 2020. The papers that constitute this panel focus on the design and development work pursued in building a searchable, open access database and directory – The Archive of the Digital Present (ADP) – to allow scholars, literary practitioners, and the public to gain knowledge about the nature and significance of literary events (online, hybrid, and in-person) that have occurred during the pandemic period, through the collection and structuring of metadata, and, in some cases, with direction to audiovisual (AV) documentation of the events themselves as they were held using platforms such as Zoom and YouTube. Our papers explain key facets of development by presenting approaches to (1) data collection and structuring, (2) stack development, (3) data visualisation, and (4) front end design, that have emerged through the process of community and user-oriented design research and development used to create the ADP